All Posts Tagged With: "Temperature"
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 [...]
Back in 2008, Steve O’Donnell wrote an article here on The Hot Aisle explaining one of the challenges he set his team during his time at BT, the difficult task of getting Asset Management right.
To summarise, Steve kicked off an audit of the whole estate, and where owners couldn’t be found for kit on the floor, [...]
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 [...]
…that cooling data centres using refrigeration is madder than a box of frogs.
Maybe he could have suggested, fresh air cooling or the new Iceotope liquid cooling solution and kept his job whilst avoiding the toxic blob.
Iceotope Unveils First Modular Liquid-Immersion Cooled Blade Server
Supercomputing 2009, Portland Oregon; 17th November 2009: Iceotope (www.iceotope.com) today launched its new liquid-cooled server technology. The system is believed to be the first to use modular “liquid immersion” of the server components and is able to reduce data centre cooling costs by 93%, saving hundreds of thousands [...]
Greenwash or Greenbacks? – an eWEEK Europe Webinar
What is the real motivation behind the Green Data Centre movement? Saving the planet… or saving money? …or keeping one step ahead of possible regulations, and saving yourself from a world of legal trouble?
Readers of the Hot Aisle will already know that moves to more efficient data centres [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I am on the West Coast of the US this week visiting with NetApp in Sunnyvale again. On this trip I had the opportunity to visit a couple of NetApp’s internal data centers (B11 and the impressive B2 sites) with Cesar Orosco, NetApp on NetApp IT Architect. Cesar is charged with using NetApp technology in [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
We have all been doing this – buy some new light bulbs, screw them in, and save the planet – simple. It was until I picked up an interesting article in today’s New York Times:
A lot of people these days are finding the new compact fluorescent bulbs anything but simple. Consumers who are trying them say they [...]
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 [...]
I picked up a really interesting website from KyotoCooling that has a very interesting new approach to low energy cooling systems. The firm takes it’s name from the Kyoto Conference where our governments met and agreed Carbon reduction targets that none of them had any intention of meeting. The Hot Aisle is firmly of the [...]
I am a member of the IEEE and receive a great magazine called IEEE Spectrum in the mail. A recent article describes the incredibly advanced thinking within the US Department of Defence on Energy conservation. Why are the DoD so interested in saving the planet? As usual it is driven by economics:
Every $10 increase in [...]
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 [...]
I read a very interesting article from fellow blogger Christian Belady, who is Principal Power and Cooling Architect at Microsoft.
Christian decided to take the PUE challenge and see if he could build a data center with a PUE of one! That is to have all of the power delivered to computing equipment and none at [...]
Recently we have been writing a lot about how hot-aisle/cold aisle containment. It is important to be aware this strategy, fire detection and protection requires special attention.
A recent article in Search Data Center gives some good advice:
Hot-aisle/cold-aisle containment – a variation on the traditional data center best practice of hot-aisle/cold-aisle design – is a way for data [...]
