5 tips for an energy-efficient data center
Designing a data center is much like designing a nursery for a newborn baby. You want your pride and joy to be happy and thrive in a room that’s not too cold, not too warm, and have the correct humidity. Below are five top tips to a happy data center. The tips are taken from the Green Grid‘s recently released whitepaper Fundamentals of data center power and cooling efficiency zones.
1. Blowing hot and cold: Having parallel rows of equipment racks facing forward may look neat and tidy but it could make a sauna out of your data center. IT equipment sucks in cool air via the front and pushes out hot air from the back. If a machine is spewing out hot air the device behind it is sucking that in when it should be taking in cold air. Imagine how hot the air must be in the last row of machines. The ideal placement for rows of equipment would be to have the front of the servers facing each other. The backs of the rows should also be facing each other to create a hot aisle/cold aisle configuration.
2. Place cables overhead: If the space underneath the raised floor is a spaghetti junction of cables cool air won’t be able to do its job in the data center. Cables should be distributed overhead and unused raised floor cutouts should be blocked to eliminate unwanted air leakage. The Green Grid recommends that perforated tiles, with a design of about 25% open area, should be used to ensure uniform and predictable airflow distribution in lower density areas.
3. Recommended temperatures: The recommended range of temperature for critical enterprise server and storage environments is between 64.4° to 80.6° F (18° to 27° C), according to the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), as cited in the whitepaper. ASHRAE also specifies a dew point value of about 5.5° C (41.9° F).
4. Set air conditioners to the same levels: Computer room air conditioning units with humidifiers are a great addition to ensure optimum humidity of the data center but if you have more than one, be sure that they are set to the same settings. If not, they could be operating at odds with one dehumidifying the air while the other is humidifying it.
5. Cool the source. The white paper recommends using row and rack-based cooling to address dynamic hot spots that can form as workloads are constantly shifted from one server to another. Cool air has a much shorter path of distribution, so bringing cooling closer to the heat source is key.