The Data Center Post recently featured a piece by Upsite Technologies’ president John Thornell, reflecting on previous wisdom from Ken Brill and applying it to 2014 cooling best practices. From the article:
Ken Brill’s Original ‘Gold Nuggets’ of Wisdom
Several years ago at an Uptime Institute Symposium, Ken Brill outlined five “gold nuggets” that could curb skyrocketing energy consumption in the data center:
1. Consolidating servers
2. Enabling server power-save features
3. Turning off servers no longer in use
4. Pruning bloated code to allow using less powerful servers
5. Improving the coefficient of data center energy efficiency
Ken was passionate about these gold nuggets because they were refreshingly simple, practical and effective – the proverbial low-hanging fruit.
Earlier this year (about a month before his passing) I was visiting Ken at his home in Maine. When we talked about results of research that sister-company Upsite had completed on cooling infrastructure, it sparked a passion that I hadn’t seen since the Symposium several years before. “I knew it! I knew it!” he exclaimed. “People are just throwing more cold air at their [IT] loads and still not fixing the root problem.” He was responding to Uptime Institute research that Upsite had recently updated.
The original study a decade ago had determined that sites had 60% bypass airflow*, and rated, running cooling capacity that was 2.6x the IT load. Coincidentally, this research led to the creation of both the KoldLok brush grommet and Upsite Technologies.
Upsite’s update to this research, with more sites and total square feet, determined that bypass airflow* had only been reduced to 48%. “That’s only about a percentage point per year over the last decade!” gasped Ken. He was right. We would have expected greater improvements, given advances in airflow management (AFM) and concerns about data center energy costs. More alarming than this, the average cooling capacity of the 45 sites researched had increased to 3.9x the IT load. Some sites had as much as 10x capacity. As Ken said, people seem to be throwing more expensive cold air at their sites instead of fixing the underlying AFM problems.
Updated ‘Gold Nuggets’ for AFM in 2014
In the spirit of Ken’s passion for data center improvement, especially simple, practical and effective improvements, Upsite offers the following AFM gold nuggets. These are designed to help data center managers determine their cooling utilization, identify AFM improvements, and then take steps to right-size cooling infrastructure to the IT load.
