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.

If the power goes out, will America’s small businesses be prepared? Not really, according to the results of a recent survey commissioned by Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson.

The survey results indicate that the issue is not really “if” the power will go out but “when.” Consider these statistics:

• 79% of the small business decision makers surveyed experienced at least one power outage in 2007.
• 67% of respondents anticipate experiencing outages again in the next 12 months.
• 42% of the small businesses that experienced outages in 2007 had to close their businesses during the longest outages.

And while small business decision makers ranked outages above fire, government regulation, weather damage, theft, and employee turnover as threats to their businesses, only 39% of them have back up power systems, leaving 61% vulnerable to the negative business impacts of outages.

“Keeping the lights on, the computers running, and employees working during a power outage is important for any business, but particularly for small businesses,” said Ed Feeney, an Emerson executive vice president who heads up Emerson Network Power’s Systems business. “Their margin for error is thinner, and the competition’s tighter, so even a brief outage can do significant harm. This makes back up power systems a fundamental part of business continuity.”

In a tight economy, a plunge into darkness could put a small business in the red. On average, power outages cost about $80 billion each year, with most losses—98%—borne by businesses, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

“Emerson’s survey findings are alarming considering that more than 99% of all American businesses are small businesses, with these companies generating 45% of the total U.S. payroll,” said Steve Strauss, nationally syndicated business columnist and author of The Small Business Bible. “It is critical that small enterprises have a business continuity plan that includes back up power systems to keep the business running when the main power source goes down.”

John Zagara, owner of Zagara’s Marketplace, a Cleveland, OH area supermarket, needs no convincing. “During the massive blackout of August 2003, the power went out mid-afternoon. Our back up power system automatically switched my electrical source to a natural gas powered generator which ran all registers and certain refrigerated equipment,” Zagara said. “Our front end staff continued to check out customers until closing at 9 p.m. Our customers were in awe of our service delivery.” Zagara’s back up power equipment enabled him to not only continue serving customers, but to save meat and frozen foods, valuable perishable inventory.

Zagara utilizes a back up generator and an ASCO power transfer switch. A power transfer switch automatically detects a loss of power from the main power source and turns on a back up generator within seconds. When the main source of power returns, the switch safely shuts down the generator and reconnects to the main power source.

To help small businesses understand the impacts of power outages, Emerson Network Power has launched a back-up power information resource at www.emerson.com/smallbusiness. It includes an online tool small companies can use to measure their vulnerability to the impacts of outages.

Emerson Network Power released the findings of the survey in conjunction with the fifth anniversary of the Great Blackout of 2003, which began on Aug. 14, 2003, when an overgrown tree tangled with sagging power lines in Ohio and triggered a series of human and technology gaffes that resulted in the largest power outage in North American history. The blackout left 50 million people in the Northeastern United States and Canada in the dark—some for days—and cost the economy an estimated $6 billion in productivity.

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.