Data Center Cooling: Top Five Things to Know About Data Cen

1. Data Center Cooling: Top Five Things to Know About Data Center Cooling

2. Data Center Cooling Several trends are taking place with data center cooling technologies and operations. As a major component of the physical data center, cooling has the potential to improve performance levels, or cause serious availability issues. Basically, data center cooling involves systems that remove heat from a data center. These systems include computer room air conditioners and subsystems such as chillers, cooling towers, condensers, air distribution devices and other system components.

3. Data Center Cooling Like many data center systems, cooling components must be integrated seamlessly to provide maximum effectiveness for the overall data center infrastructure. With changes in computing technology coming fast and furious, data center cooling systems are challenged to keep pace. The five key requirements cooling systems must address include the following:

4. Data Center Cooling Scalability. As with all IT components, the ability to scale to changing requirements is crucial. With cooling, it’s difficult to predict future needs because technologies and business strategies change often. Many companies make the mistake of over-compensating with their data center cooling systems. By doing so, they waste money and sacrifice current efficiencies while trying to accommodate some unknown future requirement. Although it is difficult to incorporate additional cooling to existing space, professional data center design consultants can help businesses find the right balance and still allow for future growth.

5. Data Center Cooling Standardization. Data center cooling installations often involve many engineers and vendors that greatly complicate deployments. However, if cooling components can be standardized, a significant amount of the complexity is eliminated. Simplifying design and installation saves companies time and money. In addition, designing customized systems can create dependencies on expensive engineering staff well into the future. Standardization helps avoid these dependencies so data center operators can focus instead on new technologies to improve overall performance.

6. Data Center Cooling Simplified Systems. Along with complexity comes a greater likelihood of performance issues like downtime. Staffing errors contribute to these performance issues when data center cooling systems are unnecessarily complex. In addition, repairs can increase costs and time requirements. Intelligence. The ability for a data center cooling system to determine functional levels can have a direct impact on performance. For example, rack temperatures can vary greatly from top to bottom. These variances place stress on individual components and can cause failure. However, a cooling system that can adjust automatically to different cooling needs will ensure greater levels of system uptime.

7. Data Center Cooling Cooling Management Systems. Providing valuable information to data center managers can help diagnose and repair cooling system problems before they cause downtime. A comprehensive management system can alert staff of individual component failures so they can be addressed immediately. Providing insight through monitoring and reporting of cooling unit performance can help alleviate costly and time-consuming issues. In addition, cooling management systems can also help with decision-making for new equipment configurations and data center expansions.

8. Data Center Cooling Data center design practices of the past are not sufficient in today’s complex IT world. Critical physical infrastructure systems, like power and cooling, must be analyzed carefully and thoroughly. Configuration of the data center cooling system greatly affects systems availability. Therefore, design practices must keep current with new network and system architectures. Bringing an experienced design consultant on-board can help ensure companies deploy a data center cooling system that not only meets today’s requirements, but can easily adapt to future infrastructures.

9. About the Author Arnie W. Evdokimo is Chief Executive Officer of DP Air Corporation, a leading provider of data center design, build and maintenance services based in Phoenix, Arizona. For more information about data center cooling, visit http://www.dpair.com/data-center-cooling/ today.