heating the water into a vapor via immersion elements or infrared lamps, which adds
cooling loads to the room, or with ultrasonic
humidification, which saves money due to its
fractional energy usage as compared to the
water heating methods. This works via very
fast vibrations that cause the water to mist.
This mist is actually cool and does not add a
cooling load to the room.
6) Optimized Airflows
Blanking panels are key for making sure
airflow goes where it’s needed. These panels
block off other open spaces within the cabinets that air could otherwise pass through,
making it so that the air can only go through
the servers to cool them down, not bypass
the servers to get back to the CRAC units.
Improved cable management can also
enhance airflow by eliminating the need for
articulating or folding cable support arms.
These devices seem like a great idea, but the
bundles of cables tied to them block air from
getting out of the cabinet. A deeper, wider
cabinet also gives you plenty of room for
cable management and allows more airflow
through the cabinet and servers. We've mea-
sured the temperature differences between
the back of the servers and these cable man-
agement arms and then between the arms
and the back door of the cabinet and found a
10 degree or more difference in air temperature. The heat was being trapped between
the cable management arms and the servers.
7) Verifying the IT Load
Meet with your IT group and work together to develop a plan for better data center
management. Facilities and IT should be on
the same page as far as removing old servers, deploying new ones and improving layouts. Remove or replace antiquated servers
during refresh projects and turn off legacy or
orphaned servers.
How many data centers have a handful of
servers still running in the corner of the data
center because the person who managed
them left years ago and now everyone is
afraid to turn them off? We have clients who
have a policy that if a server hasn’t been
managed in five years according to a server
management log, they unplug it. If no one
complains, the server is removed.
Also, work with the IT department or anyone else involved in managing the data center to turn the lights off all day. Servers don’t
care if it’s dark. Put in occupancy sensors so
people who need to work in the data center
can still have light, and make sure there’s
emergency lighting at the end of the rows.
8) Nothing Saves More
Money than Off
Anything you can turn off will save you
money, from redundant CRAC units to compressors. Implementing the low-hanging fruit
of efficiency measures will conserve energy
and lead to eliminating CRAC units.
It’s tempting to leave them on for redundancy in case there’s a failure, but the fans
from the CRAC units add heat to the supply
air and add extra load to the room on top of
what they consume power wise. If you don’t
need them for airflow, turn them off and let
them come back on during a failure mode. B
Chuck Kensky is the Executive Vice President
of Bala Consulting Engineers.
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