All Posts Tagged With: "airflow"
Yesterday Chris Leahy (my Technical Facilities Manager) and I were agonising over why we had low plenum pressure in our Data Center and why we were seeing symptoms of hot air trapped in the roof void. We looked at all the normal stuff:
Leaks in the plenum space
Badly sealed floor
Cable access holes improperly sealed
Blockages in the [...]
There are a lot of them around, Data Centres. A few of them are designed and operated very well and deliver great Power Usage Efficiency. Some could do a bit better, perhaps an airside economiser or two, or some hot or cold aisle containment, or maybe some DC power. Some are just a nightmare and [...]
Data Centre design is an evolutionary process and we can see the first signs of significant change in the latest sites. Co-generation, liquid cooling, cloud computing, high density are all likely to feature in the 2020 Data Centre. How are you placed with your existing Data Centre investments to take advantage of these changes? Will [...]
Around this time, analysts at ESG pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. One of my areas of coverage and of expertise is in the Data Center around power, cooling, reliability and economics. So what’s different this year from prior years?
Strengthening fundamental drivers will likely make 2010 materially different from [...]
Last week I met with my friend Steve Sole of Nubis who wanted to tell me about the work they have been doing in data centers around improving energy efficiency. Nubis make demountable Aisle Containment systems – they don’t care if it is Hot or Cold Aisle – the objective is to stop the air [...]
Recently The Hot Aisle conducted an online survey asking the question -
“How do you currently choose where to place equipment in your data centre?”
As usual we got a very large response to the survey with 5,580 respondants.
The results are in and it shows quite clearly that equipment placement is (to say the least) unsophisticated. A [...]
I recently chaired a very interesting panel debate and discussion Hosted By BLADE Network Technologies in London.
The panel was made up of:
Harkeeret (Harqs) Singh, Global Head Data Centre Energy Optimisation, Thomson Reuters
Finlay MacLeod, VP IT Infrastructure, EMEA, First Data Corp
Charles Ferland, VP of EMEA, BLADE Network Technologies
Brian Peterson, VP International Operations, Emulex
Tikiri Wanduragala, EMEA xSeries [...]
Next week, Iceotope will announce that it has developed, patented and manufactured an extreme IT equipment cooling solution. The solution tackles the problems of cooling servers in data centres all the way from the actual source of the heat – at the processor and memory component level – to its final destination – outside air by [...]
I met with Dr. Bruno Michel who is IBM’s, Zurich based, advanced thermal packaging manager yesterday. We spoke about IBM’s view of cooling technology in the 5 to 10 year horizon and what I heard was interesting and credible. IBM have been working with liquid cooling for some time, in the HydroCube, in the new [...]
Anyone following the news will have seen that Verari and Cisco are working closely together on developing the highest density UCS deployment so far. My friend Dan Gatti at Verari just sent over the latest photograph from the Verari manufacturing plant. A FOREST Data Center Scale container full of UCS and Nexus.
This really demonstrates the [...]
I recently had a conversation with Mark Anzani, IBM’s CTO for System z, the mainframe platform. Regular readers will know that cooling technology is a favourite subject here on the hot aisle and I was keen to get an answer to how IBM plan to cool their next range of machines, the z11 series.
IBM [...]
Here is a photograph of my ESG colleague Taya Wyss and Cesar Orosco from NetApp in Sunnyvale standing in a smart cold aisle containment system. This is an aftermarket fitting in a relatively old data centre but nevertheless a useful improvement to cooling efficiency.
The photograph shows cabinets facing front to front so that the air [...]
Containerized data center provides flexibility to balance capital expenditures and operating expenses while rapidly meeting needs for incremental, scalable capacity delivering Total Value of Ownership
Verari Systems, a premier developer of data center scale blade-based computing and storage platforms with the highest density, availability, and energy efficiency in the market, today announced that Qualcomm selected Verari’s [...]
Fujitsu just announced a new blade server system using a custom designed motherboard optimized for the form factor of the chassis so that they have been able to fit 18 blades with two CPUs each into a compact 10U package. This contrasts with the rather weak Cisco design that manages to fit all of 6 [...]
I am old enough to remember the 1960’s when IBM Mainframes used de-ionized water delivered by micro-bore pipes to cool the CPUs. (In fact I remember a spillage during a mainframe move that resulted in every single auto spares shop in south east England being raided for deionized water).
In a recent statement IBM claim that direct [...]
I spend a lot of time thinking about data centers and how to make them better, more efficient, more reliable, higher performance , easier to maintain and cheaper to run. Lots of very smart and experienced people have been doing the same for many years and whilst there is no single, agreed best practice, model [...]
We are all trying to fix the unfixable in the Data Centre. How do we get more cooling capacity from sites we built a decade ago for low power density applications?
One of the biggest problems is that everyone is trying to work against a basic law of physics; hot air rises, and cold air falls. [...]
Look for bulbs with the Energy Star label, which indicates they meet at least minimal performance requirements.
Be aware that compact fluorescents can take one to three minutes to reach full brightness. This is not a defect.
The place where people are most likely to use compact fluorescents, closets, may be a poor choice. Experts at Energy Star [...]
The California Institute of Technology – also known as Caltech — is installing monitors and developing metrics to determine the efficiencies and savings of Hot Aisle Containment enclosures recently installed in one of their data centers.
The partitions and dividers were designed and manufactured by Simplex Isolation Systems of Fontana, CA, to isolate hot air and [...]
Often the simplest ideas are the best. People wandering around the data center with mucky shoes can spread dust and other contaminants that can be sucked into the airflow and end up causing problems. These adhesive floor mats located at all entry points into the data center are designed to capture the general filth that [...]
Our atmosphere (the air around us) is made up of gasses consisting of nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%), carbon dioxide (0.3%) and water in the form of vapor (humidity). The amount of water in the atmosphere is measured as a Relative Humidity (RH)
Data Center air should contain the proper amount of water vapor to maximize the availability [...]
Today we are going to look at how fire detection systems can be used in Data Centers to prevent catastrophic loss and damage; we will focus on Very Early Smoke Detection Systems, (VESDA – Very Early Smoke Detection Alarm).
Without an efficient and safe environment, there is no way to be assured of business continuity. To [...]
This photograph shows a technique used to remove hot air from a high density area in a Data Center in Milan.
Today we are going to look at practical changes that we can all make to our data centres that will improve cooling efficiency, to enable us to install more equipment in the same space or reduce our electricity bills.
There are a few basic rules that will help us become more efficient.
The first is the less [...]
This is an interesting photograph of a commercially available APC Hot Aisle containment system. With adequate cold air to our raised floor, this rack module can house high density equipment.
