Highlighting thought leadership in the data center

• How Cap & Trade May Impact the Data Center

  February 9th, 2010 : Industry Perspectives

  Steve Yellen is Vice President of Marketing and Development for Aperture Technologies, an Emerson Network Power brand. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, and has authored numerous white papers and technical articles on data center management.
  

  STEVE YELLEN
  Emerson Network
  Power

  As governments around the world continue to explore and implement carbon emissions standards and carbon reduction commitments, many companies will be required to participate in auction-based carbon emissions trading schemes that are designed to provide economic and reputational incentives for achieving reductions in emissions. In many cases, those companies that do not reduce emissions could face financial penalties in the form of emissions credits they will need to purchase.

  For example, in the United Kingdom, the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme will begin in April 2010 to promote energy efficiency and help reduce carbon emissions. This carbon cap and trade program requires companies in the UK, including those headquartered in the country and foreign companies with UK subsidiaries, to forecast their energy usage, purchase carbon allowances from the government and monitor actual usage against forecast emissions.

  In a report issued at the end of 2009, research firm IDC predicted that there will be a renewed focus on reducing CO2 emissions, at both national and international levels. The firm suggested that by 2011 all G-20 nations will mandate companies to report carbon footprints.

  What This Means for the Data Center
  While these developments are not specifically aimed at data centers, they will impact how data centers operate and the amount of energy used. As a result, data centers will need to implement mechanisms for monitoring, managing and reporting carbon emissions.

  By improving their data center management processes, organizations can gain a comprehensive view of energy consumption and identify opportunities for improving efficiency. This increased discipline and maturity to data center management will help uncover carbon reduction opportunities and allow better management and tracking of data center carbon reduction commitments.

  Improving data center management maturity and processes can support data center carbon reduction commitments by helping uncover and identify:

  • The amount of currently produced carbon in a facility, as well as the total future amount
  • The amount of carbon credits/allowances needed to be purchased for any given year to meet business demands
  • How close a facility is to its carbon allowance threshold and a projected time when it might exceed it
  • Past carbon production over any given time period
  • Projected carbon production tied to any data center expansions or new requirements
  • Non-productive servers that can be scheduled for decommissioning and the impact it would have on carbon production
  • Technology refresh areas where older devices might be replaced with new higher-efficiency equipment

  While the United States has yet to enact a carbon cap and trade program, the government is heading in this direction. In late 2009, the U.S. government announced reporting requirements for greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, recognizing that they pose a hazard to human health. What this means is that the EPA is now taking steps to regulate them. Smart organizations will be ready when regulation begins.

  Industry Perspectives is a new content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating in Industry Perspectives.

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• Should You Build or Outsource Your Data Center?

  February 5th, 2010 : Industry Perspectives

  Jeff Hinkle is a data center industry veteran and president and owner of Global Net Access, AtlantaNAP and NetDepot.

  JEFF HINKLE
  AtlantaNAP

  The modern-day IT executive has become an integral part of any business. Systems are now vital to revenue generation, and the ever-increasing demands for online and near-instantaneous access have stretched budgets and staff. Maintaining a competitive enterprise is becoming more difficult every day.

  One of the key ways to increase performance is to focus on your organization’s core value activities. These core activities produce the most value for an organization. Unfortunately, many executives lose sight of this and become engaged in “empire-building” or “tinkering” because something “looks like a fun project” or this “will really enhance my resume”.

  The key difference is that when an activity is core to the business, it will generally receive top-level attention and focus. An IT department’s time should be dedicated to the activities that provide the most value and allow resources (such as software) to be focused only on those key areas. It could be a reservation and ticketing system for an airline; a portal that enables customers to control their finances for a bank; or a manufacturing control system for an automobile company.

  To build or not to build?
  It is imperative to outsource activities that are not core proponents of one’s business. This will free up time to focus on core activities. A prime example is when a company chooses to build its own data center.

  Building a data center or worrying about the 24×7 staffing and operations of hardware, which requires upgrades year to year, are distractions from the core mission. Many organizations are not equipped to conduct operations at an enterprise level. A smaller data center may occupy several thousand square feet and is likely to be engineered to Tier 2 standards (as defined by the Uptime Institute)  at best. Maintenance is likely to be half-hearted and fully outsourced, since this is not a core value proposition. The systems are less likely to be staffed 24×7, and the “number of nines” of operational excellence is reduced by one or two.

  Expansion is difficult, costly and time consuming. Often the facility is “maxed out” from Day One, and obtaining new capital is difficult. This endangers new projects that require more space for gear.

  Operating costs are almost always higher for smaller companies, who will not have access to bulk electrical rates that a large commercial facility might have, nor the sheer purchasing volume.

  Making an investment in hardware in as little as 6 months (within a rapidly-changing environment) may not fit a company’s needs. Many companies find themselves stuck with systems that are inflexible and incapable of handling future projects. These organizations often lack the budget to maintain a staff 24 x7, and aren’t able to maintain on-site, cold spares of equipment in case of an outage.

  This is where Hardware Infrastructure as a Service (HIAAS) companies excel in removing the hurdles that typical organizations face when trying to building in-house data centers.

  There are huge management differences in personnel types within a data center environment. From data center operations to hardware operation; from software engineering to applications support, most staff don’t understand the physical infrastructure management needs of managing HVAC refrigeration, electrical technicians or building maintenance personnel. You can outsource each of these functions, but the risk of an unmanaged resource can easily increase your lead times (this depends on the individual vendor). Using a variety of outsourced vendors further increases the complexity and number of vendor relationships (not to mention points of conflict in facility responsibility).

  Areas that must be covered within an enterprise data center include electrical, mechanical, hardware maintenance, cabling and network operations. These areas are also the lowest on the value chain and require scaling before they become affordable.

  Let’s look at a purpose built facility versus internal space at a headquarters office.

  This is one of the biggest differentiators and is measured based upon scale. A commercial data center / Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) company will be located in a “purpose-built” facility with the highest “level of operations for 9’s” reliability. This is possible because this activity is the data center provider’s core value proposition, and receives the investment and attention. The systems are more robust and the operations are more mature and refined.

  These organizations also give the customer the flexibility to expand and contract in short periods of time with little to no capital expense (CapEx) since almost the entire invoice is structured as operational expenses (OpEx). The decreased time of managing this layer of the OSI model allows a data center client to focus on the higher layers that is the most value producing.

  The commercial/enterprise data center facility might also be built to a higher physical standard. Many corporate, internal data centers are small and located in an office park adjacent to the company’s headquarters workforce. Security will almost always require more stringent and better defined measures. The physical separation and accountability by a third party away from any internal sources also eliminates potential strife. Most data breach and damage occurs from within an organization. Who do you trust?

  These are just a few of the reasons to host your data center in a purpose-built facility. It won’t necessarily save you money compared to doing it yourself, but you should see a dramatic difference in operations for the same cost of doing it yourself.

  I like to compare this to the following example: How many data centers make their own soft drinks and do their own surgery on their employees? Probably none! If they wanted to, they could, but the costs and the lack of quality of the product would probably not make sense. The same example can be applied to the soft drink company or the medical company: would they run their own data center at the same level as an established commercial facility?

  Virtualization
  The same concept applies for hardware. Hardware is now commoditized. Any last vestiges of differentiation flew out the window last year, as commercial IAAS offerings based on VMware and other virtualization technologies came to market and matured. Now, near-mainframe level, high availability and fault tolerance is available on commodity hardware. Applications have finally been separated from their hardware, and things have never been happier.

  It is not logical to make capital expenditure investments in hardware that may be obsolescent within six months. You might get locked into a platform that is costly and stifling to your applications. With the virtual private data center offerings, you are able to trade hardware as you need it, yet not share it with other companies. This allows users to grow and take more capacity as they need it (in hours instead of months). Gartner has even made the predication that 20 % of organizations will not have hardware within the next three years.

  When you layer on desktop virtualization, you have the “royal flush of the IT world”. This will be the biggest assistance to IT executives in decades. It will allow those forward and progressive thinkers to be more nimble than their competition.

  Holding onto lower value chain duties, such as data center operations and hardware provisioning/support, is a very risky business decision given the reasonably-priced and better performing alternatives. Those that embrace their core value propositions will be the ones to excel in their businesses and performance. Not to mention, it will surely make life easier.

  Industry Perspectives is a new content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating in Industry Perspectives.

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• Data Center Energy Efficiency Through BCM

  January 22nd, 2010 : Industry Perspectives

  David Dunn is Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for CoreSite, which operates more than two million square feet of wholesale data center and colocation space.

  DAVID DUNN
  CoreSite

  It happens each month to everyone who owns a home. Within the pile of invoices, letters, coupons and credit card offers that arrive in the mailbox, you find a utility bill that details the amount of electricity you consumed the previous month and the price for that electricity. You might very likely look at the bill and make a resolution to reduce your power consumption to save cash, while simultaneously reducing your carbon footprint. A noble initiative indeed!

  What if your bill not only excluded the amount of power consumed, but showed the same amount owed, month after month, regardless of use? Would you run your furnace or air conditioner less? Would you turn your computer off when not in use, unplug unused appliances, or buy more expensive energy-efficient lights? Probably not, because without information there would be no incentive to consume less.

  Now project this situation into the billing cycles of large companies. Just as with a family home, when a company’s energy usage is not transparent and the amount of money paid each month is the same no matter what is used, millions of dollars and millions of kilowatt-hours are wasted. The problem is the same, but there is a difference of several meaningful decimal places between a residential utility bill and a major company’s data center utility bill.

  Believe it or not, this nightmare billing scenario happens to companies of all sizes at many of today’s colocation facilities. It’s even worse for in-house data centers, where you might not even see, let alone be responsible for, your data center utility bill.

  How did the colocation industry come to bill power so nebulously?

  Lack of Individual Usage Information
  The cardinal rule to keep in mind when managing a data center is that power (for both IT and mechanical loads) is a finite resource. You have to restrict usage to the amount of available power. Colocation providers have understood this since the inception of the industry, and that’s why they design electrical and mechanical distribution systems around the total amount of power available (the minimum amount of power available from the utility company or the level of a generator’s capacity).

  Historically, colocation providers simply have not had a means to monitor each customer’s individual power usage to help them stay within the capacity of the power sources. They couldn’t provide customers with a summary of their electrical usage, let alone provide an incentive to reduce electrical consumption. Because they could not tell exactly how much power each customer was using, colocation providers developed pricing models that resulted in fixed power fees based on provisioned power instead of usage.

  A fixed price for power per breakered-amp was largely set at a level designed to cover the direct utility cost for the circuit’s power draw, plus the electricity required to cool the heat produced by the IT equipment. Because colocation providers lacked information and wanted to be sure to cover their costs, they set the breakered-amp price at an approximate level that assumed each customer would fully utilize each power circuit. Companies ended up paying for power they didn’t use, and at no point did they understand how much power they were actually consuming.

  It’s not that colocation customers haven’t wanted to save money or consume less power. They have always sought ways to get the most mileage from technical deployments. Data center power bills can be upwards of 30%-50% of total deployment cost, so power is an obvious target for cost-cutting initiatives.

  BCM Provides New Costing Model
  With economic events intensifying the need for a change in the way power is billed, branch circuit monitoring (BCM), the newest technology for measuring data center power, is becoming a benchmark to help both customers and colocation providers face some of their biggest power monitoring challenges.

  In its simplest form, BCM is a way to track actual usage of each power circuit, whether in a home, office or data center. Technically speaking, BCM is a system that uses current transformers (CTs) to measure the electrical current of each power circuit within an electrical panel or PDU. The BCM equipment used today has been engineered to integrate seamlessly with a wide variety of turnkey hardware and software packages used for gathering and storing circuit data. Alternatively, using open standards, it is possible to gather and store the data from a BCM circuit board using custom software and hardware. In either case, once the readings have been gathered and stored, they can be analyzed, ported, retrieved or transferred as easily as any other piece of data.

  BCM originally was implemented as an easy way to see electrical usage on each panel at a glance. Engineers and operators could know when physically looking at electrical panels if there were any circuits in danger of tripping or if there were any tripped breakers (indicated by zero current). As the technology progressed, BCM was used to trigger simple alarms for local or remote personnel charged with monitoring the health of the electrical distribution system, which resulted in higher facility uptime. Though these uptime-maximizing functions of BCM have become more robust in recent years and are one of the most important features of the technology, BCM also has opened new doors for customer-facing transparency.

  Measuring Actual Usage
  Perhaps the most profound application of the modern BCM system within the colocation facility is the ability to measure the actual usage of each power circuit as a means of calculating power fees. Now, not only can a colocation provider offer insight into actual usage, but the provider can help customers save money by identifying opportunities to reduce consumption. To accurately accomplish this, a BCM system must have a few key elements in place.

  The first requirement is a location to record and store the data supplied by the CTs within the electrical panel. As it stands today, relational databases such as SQL are used commonly as the preferred storage method for the CT measurements. A second reference table or database that defines each circuit is also required. This element of the BCM system must define the panel/PDU, circuit voltage, breaker positions within the panel (for 208V or 3-phase power), and the appropriate circuit user (the customer).

  The CT’s historical data and reference table makes it possible to generate a usage trend of each circuit, along with the ability to reference that circuit back to a specific customer. If a colocation provider can summarize power consumption in customer bills or through an online portal, customers can see usage trends and reap the benefits of energy conservation through virtualization, smart power management, or simply by identifying and shutting off underutilized servers. Different departments within a single data center deployment could also verify individual power usage for more accurate cost accounting.

  Though usage-based power pricing is primarily a boon to colocation customers, the BCM system also offers a number of meaningful benefits to colocation providers.

  As we all have witnessed in the past several years, energy prices are anything but stable, and the fees from a utility company often reflect this volatility. Employing a usage-based pricing model allows colocation providers to immediately pass along any cost changes directly to customers nearly real time without the need to manually notify customers and adjust billing - often the case in fixed pricing scenarios.

  Usage trending is another benefit BCM systems offer to colocation providers. A database of circuit data allows for the analysis of trends on circuit, panel or UPS usage to help predict future demand. Depending on the level of detail maintained in the reference database, it also might be possible to analyze power based on equipment type, market segment, geography and more.

  Time for a Change
  In the past, fixed power pricing made logical operational and business sense. Without the ability to measure and collect data on individual circuit use, it was impossible to see actual use below the UPS units (electronics on UPS units show usage). Fixed pricing still makes sense where BCM technology is not installed or for small customers. For smaller deployments, the cost of monitoring and billing relatively low power draws exceeds the benefits of transparency. On the other hand, for very large data users, monitoring consumption at the electrical panel or UPS level may make more operational or fiscal sense.

  The impact of the change from fixed to usage-based power pricing varies greatly from customer to customer, depending on their unique usage profile. At the very least, access to data on actual power usage can lead to benchmarking and, hopefully, eventual reduction. If companies can reduce their bills through reduced usage, then they have an incentive to reduce power consumption, which is good for everybody. For some companies whose power consumption periodically varies (seasonal usage, holiday peaks, etc.), the benefits of usage-based power pricing can be even greater. These companies can reduce costs during non-peak periods compared to fixed pricing models. Other types of users that have low usage/high breakered-amp profiles, such as network operators, could also stand to benefit greatly. These customers are paying a relatively high fixed power price for little power use.

  Power is the primary resource in a data center, and its availability and emissions are a growing concern. As the effects of climate change gain more attention in the national media and result in potential government regulation and oversight (as in H.R.2454), knowing not only how much power you consume, but also the generation mix of consumed power (to specifically understand carbon usage) will become increasingly important, if not a requirement. Further, you can get ahead of the curve by setting targets for future reduction. Implementing BCM in your own data center or asking your colocation provider to implement BCM technology and usage-based power pricing, is one way your company can help reduce long-term carbon emissions and save money.

  Industry Perspectives is a new content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating in Industry Perspectives.

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• New Year’s Resolutions for Data Center Managers

  December 28th, 2009 : Industry Perspectives

  Duncan Campbell is vice president of marketing for Converged Infrastructure in the Enterprise Storage, Server and Networking Worldwide Organization at HP.

  DUNCAN CAMPBELL
  HP

  As data center managers prepare for the New Year, they should consider “reinventing” their infrastructure the same way many people reinvent themselves on Jan. 1 by beginning an exercise program, quitting smoking, or sporting a new hairstyle. Particularly as 2009 brought a whirlwind of new trends and the products to support them, this is a good time to take a hard look in the mirror, re-assess your technology infrastructure, and decide on a path to data center transformation.

  In advance of 2010, what follows is a list of New Year’s Resolutions to ensure a seamless transition into the New Year:

  1. Become More Flexible: With more than 70% of IT budgets still dedicated to operations and maintenance, this is the year that data center managers should look to finally break down IT silos for a more flexible technology infrastructure that can respond instantly to business demands. New technologies and trends in computing that foster data center convergence will help make this longtime vision a data center reality in 2010.

  • Convergence integrates existing silos of compute, storage, network and facility resources with unified management to deliver a virtualized, highly-automated technology environment. With pools of shared-services that can be leveraged on-the-fly, data center managers can improve the flexibility of their environments, while speeding time to application value.

  2. Go More Green: The No. 1 problem facing today’s data centers is hitting limits of power and cooling capacity. As it becomes imperative to better control costs, a blueprint of the data center that provides a more intelligent view of the entire IT environment –including the facilities – will help data center managers reclaim stranded power and cooling capacity. To enable new levels of energy and cost efficiencies, facilities must share a common, comprehensive view of data center power and cooling. This requires a significant shift from the way most data centers are currently managed, to one in which facilities and IT managers join forces to tackle energy issues datacenter-wide. Instead of Green IT think of it as IT for “the green” that helps the pocket book and the environment!

  • With intelligent monitoring systems, energy use can be viewed, monitored and controlled in real-time, while users can establish policies for energy use to ensure compliance with internal, environmental or government regulations and goals. New power monitoring systems can extend across IT systems to include facilities as well, considering power consumption as important as systems performance in our efforts to green the data center.

  3. Make Over My Infrastructure: With server maintenance contracts set to expire after approximately three years and many customers delaying server hardware refreshes since the economy slowed, 2010 presents a good opportunity for companies to refresh their server farm. According to Gartner’s Top 10 in 2010 forecast discussed at Gartner Symposium, the cost of operating a server in three years’ time (the typical lifecycle of a server) will eventually surpass the original purchase price of the server, pointing to the need for more energy efficient computing products.

  • Customers should take advantage of the latest technologies available in servers – like power capping, embedded power management, and sensors – to ensure the power being consumed is only what’s required for the work being performed. The combination of these capabilities result in slashing server energy costs by 50 percent.

  4. Be Open-Minded: With standards-based networking products, organizations will avoid locking their infrastructure into restrictive proprietary networking solutions that entail arduous upgrades and extremely high maintenance costs. Most importantly, proprietary networking products lack the key components necessary for achieving optimal centralized network management.

  • Now more than ever, it’s becoming harder to justify the expense of proprietary software. Networking infrastructure is difficult to build and even more difficult to operate as the network grows in size and complexity. Companies should take advantage of open standards-based networking solutions that provide freedom now and into the future – by leveraging the right balance of applications and hardware, companies can optimize business results while breaking free from restrictive proprietary technology.

  5. Think Outside the Box: In order for customers to reap the full potential of a virtualized infrastructure, business need to virtualize their data dater from end-to-end. By converging servers, storage, and networking resources into a single pool, customer can increase performance, scalability and capacity, while simplifying management.

  • Storage plays a critical role in infrastructure convergence by allowing customers to virtualize stored data and create a unified virtual resource pool that is instantly accessible to support changing business needs. To maximize data center efficiency as well as reduce costs, customers need storage solutions that accommodate data growth, are aligned to business applications and are built on open standards.
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• How Digitization Drives Energy Efficiency

  December 10th, 2009 : Industry Perspectives

  Anthony Wanger is the President and Founder of i/o Data Centers. He directs the company’s strategic affairs, handles acquisition activities, and oversees the company’s marketing, HR and legal functions.

  ANTHONY WANGER
  i/o Data Centers

  The transition from physical, “offline” processes to digital, online processes is referred to as digitization or dematerialization. Processes that are digitized produce less carbon emissions than their analog counterparts. Data centers provide the infrastructure that enables this digitization to occur, serving as the foundation for the energy efficient enterprise.

  Over the past 20 years there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of offline processes that have been digitized – everything from software distribution to financial transactions to medical record keeping. The combined effect of all of these digital processes is a macro-scale reduction in the overall use of materials and a more efficient distribution of the materials.

  With the advent of the commercial Internet in the 1990s, companies have improved how they interact with their customers, partners and employees. Prior to the World Wide Web and email, businesses and government transacted in mostly inefficient and unconnected ways. For example, in order to pay a bill, a buyer would send a paper-based check by mail, which would be delivered to the recipient by way of a network of carbon-emitting postal vehicles.

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• Building the Cloud-Ready Data Center Network

  December 2nd, 2009 : Industry Perspectives

  Andy Ingram is vice president of product marketing and business development for the Fabric and Switching Technologies Business at Juniper Networks.

  ANDY INGRAM
  Juniper Networks

  Cloud computing represents a new way to deliver and consume services on a shared network and IT infrastructure. Previously, IT hardware and software were acquired and physically provisioned on site. With cloud computing, the value of these same software and hardware products are delivered on-demand in the form of services over the network. Cloud computing is not only relevant to network service providers or internet-based service providers offering cloud services to customers, enterprise or public sector IT organizations are becoming acutely aware of cloud computing’s relevance to their own internal operations.

  It is now possible for IT to build out private clouds or augment their resources with public clouds that enable their data centers to benefit from this powerful computing model. The lessons learned from cloud computing can vastly improve the scale, agility, and application service levels of enterprise data centers as well as reduce costs. Achieving these results requires close examination of the network itself, which is the foundation of the cloud-ready data center.

  It can be daunting to interconnect a growing number of virtual and physical devices while trying to simplify the network to manage these resources at scale. Management complexity increases exponentially as more devices are added. This often necessitates physical segmentation, which runs counterintuitive to building large, shared resource pools that maximize economies of scale.

  Overcoming these obstacles requires a fundamental shift in the way enterprise IT organizations build-out their legacy data center networks. Success in building a scalable, cloud-ready data center network requires following three critical steps: (1) simplify, (2) share and (3) secure.

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• Reaching Self-Actualization in IT Energy Efficiency

  December 1st, 2009 : Industry Perspectives

  Elisabeth Stahl is the Chief Technical Strategist, Performance Marketing for IBM Systems and Technology Group.

  ELISABETH STAHL
  IBM

  Anyone who took Psychology 101 in school remembers Maslow’s hierarchy. In this groundbreaking 1943 paper, Abraham Maslow outlined a pyramid to demonstrate the five distinct levels of human “need.” His pyramid showed basic, physiological needs at the bottom, more sophisticated needs at the top, all leading to the ultimate, final phase characterized by a profound level of “self-actualization” of identity and purpose.

  However, this theory assumes that only personal growth can be achieved by moving through the five levels. In an interesting twist, we can actually apply Maslow’s hierarchy to data center energy efficiency, allowing us to ultimately realize the maximum potential for our IT organizations.

  The world has grown passionately interested in energy efficiency within the data center in the last several years. As energy prices climb and organizations outgrow their power and cooling limits, it becomes imperative for data center managers to address IT energy efficiency through green initiatives. Many of us have become intimately familiar with recommendations for improving the efficiency of our data centers. Create those hot and cold aisles, use those pillows and baffles, update those cables and that lighting, consolidate and virtualize, and maybe try some innovative water cooling technology.

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• Managing the Expanding Temperature Envelope

  November 30th, 2009 : Industry Perspectives

  Fred Stack is vice president of marketing for Liebert Precision Cooling at Emerson Network Power. Stack is responsible for new product development roadmaps that reflect evolving market demands and incorporate new technology.

  FRED STACK
  Emerson
  Network Power

  The recent expansion of data center temperature limits has raised various questions and concerns throughout the industry. Some data center and IT managers have voiced reservations about elevating the overall data center temperature and reducing their outage ride through time while others seek all possible efficiency gains.

  As a refresher, the purpose of the ASHRAE-recommended envelope is to give guidance on maintaining high reliability while efficiently operating data centers. The newest ASHRAE recommended environmental range for class one and two data centers is 18 to 27° C (64.4 to 80.6° F) (dry bulb temperature). The allowable envelope which broadens the range to 32° C (90° F) is where IT equipment manufacturers test product in order to verify that the unit will function with no damage for periods of times generally assumed to be counted in hours or a few days for emergency operation.

  These higher temperature ranges are being promoted to emphasize to the industry that these are server input temperatures, not cooling unit return temperatures. The temperatures in the cold aisles can be significantly increased from the averages across the industry for a significant increase in the cooling capacity and efficiency of the cooling equipment.

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• Stay Current on Data Center News

  October 16th, 2009 : Rich Miller

  We’ve had a lot of new visitors to Data Center Knowledge this week to check out Facebook Now has 30,000 Servers and The Sidekick Failure and Cloud Culpability. If you’ve just discovered us, DCK provides daily coverage of data centers, web hosting and cloud computing. You can stay current on our latest headlines by subscribing to our daily e-mail updates or by RSS. You can also follow us on Twitter, where we provide real-time updates on the latest data center news. Here are some other resources that might be of interest:

  • We’ve been writing about the data center industry non-stop since 2005, and our archives include more than 3,750 articles about virtually every facet of the industry. You can use our search box, located at the top of the right-hand column, to research recent activity by keyword, geographic market or company.
  • If you’re interested in publicly held companies in this sector, check out our Data Center Investor channel for performance updates on data center stocks. For tracking individual stocks, you can use the “Companies” link in our navigation bar, or just type the company’s ticker symbol into our search box.
  • If cool videos of data center tours are what you seek, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.
  • Also of possible interest: the DCK White Paper Library, Data Center Jobs Board, and our listing of Data Center Conferences.
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