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James Cerwinski
August 4, 2010
In my last post, I explained that “it is widely accepted that you can save energy by avoiding over cooling a data center.” That seems like a fair statement to accept, but have had one person question this statement — explaining that the fans on the servers might have to run more often.
Let us look at what ASHRAE and Gartner have to say on this.
ASHRAE’s takes the following position in their book titled “Best Practices for a Datacom Facility Energy Efficiency”
“Environmental conditions have a substantial impact on energy efficiency and total cost of ownership in a datacom facility.”
“Moving away from a “colder is better” philosophy can result in significant energy savings due to greater refrigeration cycle thermodynamics efficiency and increased economizer hours.”
“Allowing for increased temperature and humidity dead bands will eliminate “fighting” between adjacent supply air units, which is a significant source of inefficiency in some existing facilities.”
David J. Cappuccio, Gartner managing vice president and chief of research for the Infrastructure teams has made the following position — “Data center managers can save up to 4 percent in energy costs for every degree of upward change in the baseline temperature, known as a set point. The higher set point means less frequent use of air conditioning, which saves the energy used to run cooling systems”
Tell me about your experiences.
James Cerwinski
James Cerwinski
August 2, 2010
Who is ASHRAE and how can they help data center managers save energy?
The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-Conditioning (“ASHRAE”), founded in 1894, is an international organization with 51,000 persons. ASHRAE fulfills its mission of advancing heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration to serve humanity and promote a sustainable world through research, standards writing, publications, and continuing education. One such publication is the “Best Practices for Datacom Facility Energy Efficiency” in which they define the recommended temperature and humidity level as measured at the inlet of datacom equipment. A valuable point to note is that the 2009 recommended upper limit temperature is 80.6 degrees F which is an increase of 3.6 degrees F over the 2004 recommendation. It is also important to note that the specific recommended range is defined more precisely on a Psychrometric chart in which each point is defined by the dry-bulb temperature and the relative humidity.
It is widely accepted that you can save energy by avoiding over-cooling a data center. More on this in my next post.
James Cerwinski
Allen Yang
July 28, 2010
At Raritan’s data centers, we integrate network monitoring and management with console management and power management into a single global IT dashboard. From the IT dashboard, IT members can see the current hot issues and track their progresses, or click into the network monitoring system to see the details of topology map and network and servers health. What’s cool is that, with Dominion PX, the network monitor also displays environmental sensor information such as the temperature on the same screen, making it really convenient for IT members. The only glitch was that we initially forgot to make it clear that the temperature was reported in 1/10 Celcius units, I almost had a heart attack when I saw the temperature numbers for the first time.
The dashboard summarizes power consumption information for each data center; for details, IT administrators can then click through to access Power IQ. This is convenient enough for now; but we are thinking to correlate the server utilization with data center power consumption in the future. And we are waiting for the next release of Power IQ to calculate data center PUE numbers as we are now calculating that manually.
After we integrated network management with power management, we are currently integrating Raritan CC-SG and KVM into the same IT dashboard to provide the same one-click convenience of securely accessing servers and VMs through Raritan CC-SG/KVM devices. We can do this all because of Raritan’s support for open standards and popular AA services including SNMP, IPMI and Active Directory in its products. It feels really good to see that Raritan products integrate easily with popular network management tools.
Richard Dominach
July 28, 2010
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Dorothy Ochs
July 26, 2010
Full Power: Join us as we share our ideas on how to efficiently power your data center and impact your bottom line.
Energy is the single largest expense of data center operations. Improving efficiency is the surest way to impact your bottom line.
Join us for a first-of-its-kind energy summit featuring power players from Raritan, Teledata Communications, Federspiel Controls, and Power Assure. Learn from the experts how to capitalize on data center energy efficiency as they debunk common misconceptions and illustrate: