The First Facility Management Blog

Given the current economic conditions, here are 10 suggestions for facility managers to get more from their data centers in 2009 while spending less money, courtesy of Emerson Network Power.

1. Cover Your Bases. It may be more difficult to recover from an outage during tough economic times than during prosperous one. A relatively small investment in precision air conditioning and backup power can actually save money. For example, precision air conditioning will adequately protect data center assets; building air conditioning alone will not. A double conversion backup power solution with adequate redundancy is essential to raising system availability and ensuring business continuity.
2. Look Inside Before Outside. Increasing density may be a more cost effective approach to meet the need for more capacity than new facility development. For example new cooling architectures can enable densities notably higher than average data center densities at a fraction of the cost of building a new facility.
3. Assess Before Action. Perhaps one of the smartest investments businesses can make in the coming year will be to asses their data center to identify and resolve vulnerabilities that threaten availability, increase data center efficiency, and improve planning and budget allocation.
4. Go From Room to Rack. Utilizing an integrated enclosure system (i.e. data center in a box or mini computer room offers a cost effective solution to protecting the equipment that may be in a small data center or room. Instead of conditioning the whole room environment, just protect the rack.
5. Cap the Cold Aisle. Cold aisle containment allows cooling units to run at reduced capacity to achieve ideal cooling conditions and save energy costs. This tactic is more efficient and effective than hot aisle containment systems and offers a better environment for data center personnel.
6. Check the Weather Forecast. In many locations, economizers can be used to allow outside cool air to complement data center cooling systems and provide “free cooling” during colder months. This approach lowers energy usage, lessens wear on some components in the cooling equipment, and decreases operational costs. All together, it can be a welcome reduction in the data center electricity bill.
7. Watch Often—If Not Always. The importance of monitoring what’s going on inside the complex and dynamic data center is more important than ever. Keeping an eye on performance will help businesses steer clear of unnecessary maintenance and repair costs. Success in this endeavor will require IT and facilities to integrate disparate data into a centralized portal where actionable and meaningful information can be derived.
8. Improve Energy Utilization. Opportunities exist to improve energy use throughout data centers of all sizes. For example, adding variable frequency drives to cooling systems allows them to recognize reduced loads and operate more efficiently. Every watt of savings achieved on the processor level will create a total of 2.84 watts of savings for the facility.
9. Avoid Cutting Corners. A preventive maintenance plan can extend equipment life and reduce maintenance costs. For example, employ a battery maintenance strategy so that your business isn’t a victim of the number one cause of UPS failure: bad batteries.
10. Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow. It may be necessary to minimize capital expenditures but make sure you don’t compromise future scalability. UPS scalability is emerging as a popular solution to reducing the risk associated with miscalculating future capacities. Statistical analysis of UPS system configurations in light of failure rates shows that system reliability begins to decrease sharply when more than four UPS modules are used in a single system.

As part of its work, the California Energy Commission operates a Research Development and Demonstration (RD&D) Division, which oversees the Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program. The PIER program focuses on a number of energy areas, including Building Efficiency. This research aims to decrease building energy use by developing or improving energy-efficient technologies, strategies, tools, and building performance evaluation methods.

Periodically, PIER will publish informational briefs based on its research, which is often conducted with a variety of organizations with funding from the California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program. The briefs are written and prepared by E Source.

PIER recently released a brief on research on the efficiencies of various types of uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) for data centers under a variety of operating conditions. The study, titled “Uninterruptible Power Supplies: A Data Center Efficiency Opportunity,” also proposed an efficiency label for UPSs and estimated the current energy use of the existing stock of UPSs and the potential savings if efficiency standards were in place.

Collaborators on the project included Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its subcontractors, EPRI Solutions, and Ecos Consulting.

The report can be downloaded free of charge at this link. Registration required.

The global provider of integrated power and cooling services has introduced a Cable Infrastructure Assessment Service aimed at simplifying the process of data center transformations to 10 Gigabit (Gb/s) Ethernet network architectures.

This new service, specially designed for Cisco, supports the global launch of the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series. The Cisco Nexus 5000 is a line of Layer 2 access switches designed for data centers that provide high-density, low-latency, 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching, as well as a fully unified data center fabric integrating LAN, SAN and HPC traffic.

The APC Cable Infrastructure Assessment Service, available through Cisco Advanced Data Center services, delivers the resources, expertise and tools needed to prepare data centers to meet 10 Gb/s Ethernet specifications. Based on individual customer needs and requirements, APC’s BICSI certified Registered Communication Distribution Designers® (RCDD) will evaluate the existing structured cabling solution and recommend changes that will ensure support for current or emerging 10 Gb/s Ethernet technologies.

To read about ensuring that your network is ready for a changeover, see “It’s All About The Network,” which appears in the March 2008 issue of TFM.

Unified Fabric over Ethernet simplifies and reduces data center infrastructure. As organizations grow their networks to support bandwidth-intensive applications such as those enabled by server virtualization and I/O consolidation, 10 Gb/s Ethernet technology is becoming increasingly pervasive.

The APC Cable Infrastructure Assessment Service includes a broad range of activities to help customers deploy the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series and other advanced technologies in their data center environment using a lifecycle services approach. To find out more about the APC Cable Infrastructure Assessment Service for Cisco Nexus family switches, visit www.cisco.com/go/nexusservices or www.apc.com/techpartners.

The APC Cable Infrastructure Assessment Service for the Cisco Nexus switches is available immediately in the United States and Canada.

The global provider of integrated power and cooling services has introduced a Cable Infrastructure Assessment Service aimed at simplifying the process of data center transformations to 10 Gigabit (Gb/s) Ethernet network architectures.

This new service, specially designed for Cisco, supports the global launch of the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series. The Cisco Nexus 5000 is a line of Layer 2 access switches designed for data centers that provide high-density, low-latency, 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching, as well as a fully unified data center fabric integrating LAN, SAN and HPC traffic.

The APC Cable Infrastructure Assessment Service, available through Cisco Advanced Data Center services, delivers the resources, expertise and tools needed to prepare data centers to meet 10 Gb/s Ethernet specifications. Based on individual customer needs and requirements, APC’s BICSI certified Registered Communication Distribution Designers® (RCDD) will evaluate the existing structured cabling solution and recommend changes that will ensure support for current or emerging 10 Gb/s Ethernet technologies.

To read about ensuring that your network is ready for a changeover, see “It’s All About The Network,” which appears in the March 2008 issue of TFM.

Unified Fabric over Ethernet simplifies and reduces data center infrastructure. As organizations grow their networks to support bandwidth-intensive applications such as those enabled by server virtualization and I/O consolidation, 10 Gb/s Ethernet technology is becoming increasingly pervasive.

The APC Cable Infrastructure Assessment Service includes a broad range of activities to help customers deploy the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series and other advanced technologies in their data center environment using a lifecycle services approach. To find out more about the APC Cable Infrastructure Assessment Service for Cisco Nexus family switches, visit www.cisco.com/go/nexusservices or www.apc.com/techpartners.

The APC Cable Infrastructure Assessment Service for the Cisco Nexus switches is available immediately in the United States and Canada.

Last September, Emerson Network Power released results from an industry survey providing insight into the actions some data center operators have taken to increase the efficiency of their facilities and identifying the challenges organizations face in driving additional improvements.

The survey was conducted by the Data Center Users’ Group® (DCUG), a group of influential data center, IT, and facility managers formed by Emerson Network Power. It was completed in coordination with the U.S. EPA and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs to support the EPA’s recently released “Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency.”

The Executive Summary of the EPA report can be downloaded here.
EPA_Report_Exec_Summary_Final.pdf

More than 150 DCUG member companies and non-member Fortune 500 companies participated in the survey, which covered a variety of data center topics including power management, precision cooling, energy efficiency, technology implementation, and consolidation.

According to the survey, the majority of respondents have made operational improvements to increase energy efficiency. Seventy-seven percent have their data center arranged in a hot aisle/cold aisle configuration to increase cooling system efficiency; 65% use blanking panels to minimize recirculation of hot air; and 56% have sealed the floor to prevent cooling losses. The survey also shows the growing popularity of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to identify hot spots and optimize airflow within the facility, with 25% of respondents having already conducted a CFD analysis of their facilities.

“We have been promoting the value of best practices to optimize the efficiency of existing systems for the last several years, so it is gratifying to see these tactics being widely adopted in the market,” said Bob Bauer, Emerson group vice president and Liebert Worldwide president. “They are among the first – and easiest – steps in optimizing data center efficiency. Now, we as an industry have to address the challenges of taking efficiency initiatives even further.”

According to the survey, challenges that data center professionals face as they try to reduce energy use include “lack of management priority” (40%), “not clearly understanding the cost/benefit relationship” (36%), “not wanting to risk reliability” (35%), and “lack of communication between IT and facilities” (33%).

Other survey results show that, on average, 60% of the data center electrical load is used to power IT equipment, with approximately 56% of that being used to power servers, 27% for storage, and 19% for network equipment. In addition, 41% of survey respondents said their data center electrical usage is not metered separately from the rest of their facilities. Forty-one percent of respondents also noted that they did not have a dedicated facility for their data center.

• Eighty-one percent believe that by 2012, they will need additional data center capacity, despite the fact that 64% have built or upgraded their data center in the last five years.
• More than a quarter (27%) of respondents believe that despite consolidation and the use of virtualization, their server inventory will increase throughout the next five years.
• The average power density per rack is approximately 6.5 kW, while the maximum power density in any one rack averages approximately 12.9 kW.

Founded in 2003, the DCUG contains approximately 1,000 members; the group meets semi-annually to discuss the most relevant issues affecting the reliability, availability, and cost of operation for mission critical installations. The group’s membership comprises executives with a wide variety of IT and facilities management expertise from an assortment of companies, including board member companies Capital One, Cincinnati Bell Technology Solutions, JPMorgan Chase, and Meijer, among others.

Frost & Sullivan recently bestowed the company with its 2007 Global Data Center Solutions Company of the Year Award.

APC-MGE, part of the critical power and cooling services business unit of Schneider Electric, announced yesterday that it received the award from global growth consulting company Frost & Sullivan. The award is based on a number of criteria, including market share growth, quality product performance, manufacturing capabilities, technological skills, and the effectiveness of distribution channel partners.

“For the past seven years, APC-MGE has consistently increased its revenue share and mindshare within the data center market,” said Farah Saeed, senior consultant with Frost & Sullivan. “Their success is a combination of customer-centric power and cooling solutions and the execution of successful strategic industry alliances. By advancing the progress of data center solutions in efficiency, design and scalability, while continuing to exceed the latest application requirements, they are a true leader and a worthy recipient of the 2007 Frost & Sullivan Data Center Solutions Company of the Year Award.”

Another factor cited in APC’s selection was the company’s customer service and customer loyalty levels. The company has the expertise to identify market needs and changes while executing innovative strategies within the existing competitive landscape.

“We are delighted that Frost & Sullivan chose to recognize APC-MGE’s success in both data center product innovation and company performance,” said Laurent Vernerey, APC-MGE’s president and chief executive officer. “With the investments we are making today, we are positioning APC-MGE for long-term success in our traditional markets, as well as within the data center and enterprise space.”

In order to select the award recipient, analysts quantify several market factors for each market participant according to predetermined criteria, paying close attention to their combined operations. This process includes interviews with all market participants, customers, and suppliers, along with extensive secondary and technology research. The companies’ efforts are then analyzed based on the number of new customers, new segments, and commitment to business expansion together with market growth. Industry participants are then ranked based on predetermined measurement criteria.

APC, a global leader in integrated critical power and cooling services, has unveiled its new Efficiency Quotient online tool to help IT professionals worldwide determine the efficiency levels of their data center. APC’s easy-to-use Efficiency Quotient tool provides a fact-based rating of an existing data center’s current efficiency levels; recommended next steps for improvement; access to related white papers, tools and information; and more information on the key elements of an Efficient Enterprise. This is the first in a series of efficiency quotient tools that APC will introduce in the months ahead.

Gartner Research predicts that by 2008, 50% of today’s data centers will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high density equipment.* In fact many IT professionals today already grapple with insufficient power and cooling capabilities in their data centers and the problem is only expected to grow more challenging as the need for power has increased due to the adoption rate of more powerful blade server technology.

Once an IT professional completes the 18 question survey (requiring only multiple-choice or yes/no responses), the online measurement tool provides an audit of current efficiency and identifies any gaps that need attention to improve efficiency. The audit provides results in three categories including the data center infrastructure efficiency (0 – 100%), the IT efficiency effectiveness on a relative scale of zero to five, and the data center’s efficiency maturity level also on a relative scale of zero to five. The data center infrastructure efficiency is a quantitative metric based on the methodology described in APC’s White Paper #113, ‘Electrical Efficiency Modeling for Data Centers.’ In addition, an overall efficiency score, on a scale of 0 to 5, lets the user know their overall performance level.

“APC’s new Data Center Efficiency Quotient tool offers our customers and others a quick way to benchmark themselves on the energy efficiency of their data center in both a qualitative and quantitative way,” said Carl Cottuli, vice president of APC’s Data Center Science Center. “In addition to providing an overall efficiency score, the measurement tool offers peer results so companies can compare themselves to other companies in their industry. With a data center efficiency quotient score, users now have a fundamental understanding of where they are today, and what those next steps are toward becoming an Efficient Enterprise.”

Based on the survey results, the tool provides recommended next steps to immediately improve a user’s efficiency. While there are other variables that effect data center infrastructure efficiency, such as geographical location, this tool is meant to provide a relative score from which a user can begin to benchmark themselves against their peers.

About APC-MGE
In February 2007, APC and MGE UPS Systems combined to form a $3 billion (€2.4 billion) Critical Power & Cooling Services business unit of Schneider Electric. Together, APC and MGE offer the industry’s most comprehensive product and solution range for critical IT and process applications in industrial, enterprise, small and medium business and home environments.

*Meeting the Data Center Power and Cooling Challenge,’ December 19, 2006 by
Michael A. Bell, Gartner Research

APC, a provider of integrated critical power and cooling services, has announced it has partnered with Sun Microsystems to design a portion of the company’s new energy efficient data center in Santa Clara, CA. Commissioned as part of Sun’s Eco InnovationSM Initative, the rack-based data center leverages a flexible, scalable APC InfraStruXure® InRow™ cooling solution that enables Sun to reduce the cost and environmental impact of maintaining its high density IT systems. In addition, APC’s software solutions enable Sun to monitor environmental disruptions throughout the data center to ensure efficiency and eliminate downtime.

APC provided Sun with 18 InfraStruXure Hot-Aisle Containment Systems for Sun’s new 13,000 square foot software research data center. The 18 hot-aisle containment systems use a total of 450 enclosures, which include 230 APC NetShelter® VX and 220 Sun racks. Each of these hot-aisle containment systems operate at an average of 5 kW of heat load per rack and use APC’s innovative InRow cooling solutions to cool the load. Cooling capacity is pre-piped to enable placement of additional InfraStruXure InRow RC cooling units into each data center system, bringing the overall cooling capacity to a 9 kW average per rack.

While this implementation can sustain an average of 9 kW per rack, much higher density racks can be incorporated with lower density racks to take full advantage of the flexibility of the InfraStruXure Hot-Aisle Containment System. APC partnered with Sun to design and implement the suspended hot-aisle containment systems to work with any type of rack. The design allows Sun to add or subtract racks from each data center system. In addition, an overhead flap system helps to contain the hot aisle air, a requirement due to the differences in enclosure heights.

To provide the essential energy efficiency demanded as part of the Sun Eco Innovation Initiative, while still accommodating future data center growth, Sun also installed three APC 800kW Symmetra® MW uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) across two lab buildings. Testing proved that the Symmetra MW offered Sun up to 97% efficiency and that, over a 10-year period, the possible energy savings to the company could exceed $1 million on the three installed UPS systems. The Symmetra MW scales from 400kW to 1.6MW.

“Given the remarkable pace with which our company’s computing environments are evolving, we are challenged with the need to effectively and efficiently power and cool our data centers,” said Michael Ryan, staff engineer in the WR Global Lab and Data Center Design Services group at Sun Microsystems. “With this challenge comes a commitment on Sun’s part to maintain an energy efficient data center that will address our capacity needs while still reducing environmental impact and costs. APC has created modular, scalable cooling systems and UPS units that fit the flexible and adaptable nature of our next-generation data center demands and enable us to easily accommodate future growth. We greatly appreciate the partnership with APC to design and install its innovative InfraStruXure Hot-Aisle Containment Systems at our Santa Clara campus and look forward to working with the company on upcoming sites.”

To ensure that Sun can consistently distribute power and monitor and maintain conditions within its data center environment, each IT enclosure includes two APC switched Rack Power Distribution Units (PDUs) and an APC Environmental Monitoring Unit. In addition, the data center room is monitored by APC Netbotz surveillance cameras that tie into APC’s InfraStruXure Central management platform.

“The new Sun Microsystems data center in Santa Clara is an ideal example of the kind of next-generation architecture that can and will help alleviate some of the environmental and economic strain that today’s high density computing is placing on the industry,” said Rob Johnson, senior vice president and president of North America at APC-MGE. “We are honored to have been selected for the task of helping build this software data center and believe we have designed and installed a solution that is highly efficient, extremely reliable and will support the evolving needs of Sun well into the future.”

Data center teams will learn comprehensive energy and thermal management strategies

Degree Controls, Inc. (DegreeC) has announced its fourth seminar in a series addressing the growing problem of data center cooling. In addition to addressing energy and thermal management in the data center, the seminar will include analysis and discussion of the EPA’s Report on Server and Data Center Efficiency, which was submitted to the U.S. Congress in August of this year.

The seminar will be held November 1, 2007 at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, VA.

Kevin Heslin, Editor of Mission Critical magazine, which is the exclusive media sponsor for the seminar, will kick-off the seminar with an industry and trend report. “We are delighted to be involved in this seminar. DegreeC’s seminar series is touching on a topic that is very timely for today’s data center teams,” said Heslin.

Joe Loper, Vice President of Policy and Research at the Alliance to Save Energy, will deliver the luncheon keynote and provide attendees with insight on the expected effects of the EPA report on server efficiency. “I look forward to helping attendees understand what actions can be expected in the coming year. More importantly, I look forward to hearing the concerns of the data center teams that are in attendance,” said Loper.

The presentation portion of the seminar will include topics ranging from humidity to LEED certification.

Martin Olsen, Director of Product Management and Development at Active Power, Inc. will discuss how UPS systems based on thermal and compressed air can provide both back up power and cooling during a power outage.

Wally Phelps, Data Center Product Manager at DegreeC, will discuss how directing airflow rather than flood cooling can significantly lower cooling costs and reduce energy consumption.

Coy Stine, Simulation Engineer at DegreeC, will discuss the surprising hidden energy costs of humidity decisions.

Steve Spinazzola, Vice President, RTKL Associates will present a case study on building a LEED certified data center.

Michael J. Gagnon, Vice President of Product Development at Wright Line, LLC, will present a case study on the costs, benefits and efficiencies achieved by close-coupled heat containment, which can result in as much as 22 kW of effective heat removal per rack enclosure.

“For most large and mid-sized corporations the data center is the last frontier for major energy savings at low investment,” said Eric Birch, Executive Vice President of DegreeC. “This seminar will help attendees ensure that their data centers are running as efficiently as possible. In addition, attendees will learn, what (if any) government action will be taken with regard to data center efficiency.”

Emerson Network Power has released results from a recent industry survey that provides insight into the actions some data center operators have taken to increase the efficiency of their facilities and identifies the challenges organizations face in driving additional improvements.

The survey was conducted by the Data Center Users’ Group(DCUG), a group of influential data center, IT, and facility managers formed by Emerson Network Power. It was completed in coordination with the U.S. EPA and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs to support the EPA’s recently released “Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency.” More than 150 DCUG member companies and non-member Fortune 500 companies participated in the survey, which covered a variety of data center topics including power management, precision cooling, energy efficiency, technology implementation, and consolidation.

According to the survey, the majority of respondents have made operational improvements to increase energy efficiency. Seventy-seven percent have their data center arranged in a hot aisle/cold aisle configuration to increase cooling system efficiency, 65% use blanking panels to minimize recirculation of hot air and 56% have sealed the floor to prevent cooling losses. The survey also shows the growing popularity of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to identify hotspots and optimize airflow within the facility, with 25% of respondents having already conducted a CFD analysis of their facilities.

“We have been promoting the value of best practices to optimize the efficiency of existing systems for the last several years, so it is gratifying to see these tactics being widely adopted in the market,” said Bob Bauer, Emerson group vice president and Liebert Worldwide president. “They are among the first – and easiest – steps in optimizing data center efficiency. Now, we as an industry have to address the challenges of taking efficiency initiatives even further.”

According to the survey, challenges that data center professionals face as they try to reduce energy use include “lack of management priority” (40%), “not clearly understanding the cost/benefit relationship” (36%), “not wanting to risk reliability” (35%) and “lack of communication between IT and facilities” (33%).

Other survey results show that, on average, 60% of the data center electrical load is used to power IT equipment, with approximately 56% of that being used to power servers, 27% for storage, and 19% for network equipment. In addition, 41% of survey respondents said their data center electrical usage is not metered separately from the rest of their facilities. Forty-one percent of respondents also noted that they did not have a dedicated facility for their data center.

Additional results include the following:

• Eighty-one percent believe that by 2012 they will need additional data center capacity, despite the fact that 64% have built or upgraded their data center in the last five years.

• More than a quarter (27%) of respondents believe that despite consolidation and the use of virtualization, their server inventory will increase throughout the next five years.

• The average power density per rack is approximately 6.5 kW, while the maximum power density in any one rack averages approximately 12.9 kW.

Founded in 2003, the DCUG contains approximately 1,000 members; the group meets semi-annually to collaboratively discuss the most relevant issues affecting the reliability, availability and cost of operation for mission-critical installations. The group’s membership comprises executives with a wide variety of IT and facilities management expertise from an assortment of companies, including board member companies Capital One, Cincinnati Bell Technology Solutions, JPMorgan Chase and Meijer, among others.