I am not sure at what point I am meant to stop saying happy New Year to people but Happy New Year to you all.

New Year’s resolutions?  Eat and drink less.  Do more exercise.  Keep my inbox below 200 messages and stop being polite to people who don’t install blanking panels in their data centre racks.

I am not sure when, about 2 years ago I think, it became yesterday’s news to stop publishing and presenting the “10 no cost / low cost data centre efficiency improvements”.  I think the original improvement list was much longer and came from the Green Grid but most commercial organisations adapted the original to meet their own needs and reduced it down to 10.

Almost every data centre conference, event, trade show and CPD training session used that list, or a variation of it, to hit home the data centre efficiency message.  It got to the point where you could audibly hear the groans in the audience when the slide appeared.  So I and everyone else stopped presenting and talking about it.  The war was won.  The message 100% received.  Everyone in the industry knew hot aisle and cold aisle was the only way to lay out your racks.  Aisle containment, whatever your preference for hot or cold, should be implemented.  Not installing blanking panels in empty u spaces should carry a punishment of being the tea boy for a month.

But guess what?  The war was not won at all.  Everyone in the industry got weary of the message, nodded their heads.  “Yes we know and we all do it, leave us alone”. It’s similar to using mobile phones while driving.  Everyone knows it’s against the law.  Everyone agrees it’s a bad thing to do and is dangerous but every single day you see people in their cars holding their phones.  I see it every time I drive anywhere and in every country I visit.

It’s exactly the same with blanking panels and many of the other items on the list of basic energy efficiency improvements produced in 2008 by the Green Grid. This is not an exaggeration when I say this.  Every single data centre I have ever visited, and I visit a lot in my line of work, is defective when it comes to the energy efficiency basics.  I am happy to say most are small offenders.  The odd blanking panel missing, the occasional floor tile not sealed correctly, but many are hardened criminals.   I still see on a regular basis racks that all face the same direction.  Entire rows of empty racks with no blanking or side panels.  Medium to high density rows with no aisle containment.

These are the basics people.  If you want to start implementing some of the more creative and complex energy efficiency solutions, reduce your energy consumption and save money, then you have to do the simple stuff first.

So my New Year’s resolution is clear.  I am dusting off the old presentations.  I am going to print out the original Green Grid guide and I am going on a mission.  If you don’t want to see a 4 year old power point presentation on blanking panels then I suggest you dig deep into your 2015 budget and start getting the basics right.

Written By: Simon Brady, Emerson Network Power

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As many of us know, in traditional data centers, approximately one-half of the energy consumed goes to support IT equipment while the other half is used by support systems.

Moreover, complexity and critical conditions have increased in recent years.  Since the cost of downtime is high (a full shutdown costs more than € 500,000, source: 2011 National Study on Data Center Downtime), availability of IT capacity is generally an important metric on which data centers are evaluated. Today, however, data centers must also operate efficiently while providing flexibility to quickly adapt to changes in computing demand.

Emerson Network Power conducted a systematic analysis of the energy consumed in data centers and of the various approaches that lead to energy conservation.

We have identified five best practices that represent proven approaches to improve overall data center performance:

1. Maximize the return temperature at the cooling units to improve capacity and efficiency;
2. Match cooling capacity and airflow with IT loads;
3. Utilize cooling designs that reduce energy consumption;
4. Enable data center monitoring to improve capacity, efficiency and availability;
5. Utilize local design and service expertise to extend equipment life, reduce costs and address your data center’s unique challenges.

Do you know further practices that can serve as the foundation for data center design?

If you want to learn more, read the white paper.

You can also read more about SmartAisle.

This article was written by: Matej Kordisch, Emerson Network Power. To read more Blogs by Emerson, please visit: http://blog.emersonnetworkpower.com/ 

Kollengode Anand | November 20, 2014 | Emerson Network Power

It’s no longer enough to be dependable if you’re running a data center.  With greater demands being placed by customers, both external and internal, data center administrators are required to be both dependable and fast. Consider these facts, from our “State of the Data Center” report last year:

• The equivalent of one of every nine persons on the planet uses Facebook.
• We generated 1.6 trillion gigabytes of data last year. That’s enough data to give every single person on Earth eight 32-gigabyte iPhones, and it’s an increase of 60 percent in just two years.
• Every hour, enough information is created to fill more than 46 million DVDs.
• Global e-Commerce spending topped $1.25 trillion in 2013.

It’s always been important to respond to your customers, of course, but now there are more of them, demanding more information, and more quickly:  the report says that if the online video they are watching buffers for more than five seconds, 25 percent of viewers drop off.  And if the video buffers for more than 10 seconds, half of them are gone.

Oh, and did we mention that the average cost of a data center outage now runs more than $900,000…an increase of one-third in just two years?

Which is why it’s critical for administrators to be able to flexibly configure their data centers, and to be able to react rapidly when requirements change, or when there’s a problem.  We’ve found that a unified approach to the entire infrastructure is the best way of handling these situations.  Whether it’s heating and cooling, power, servers, software, or more, the ability to administer data center operations in a real-time manner has become more imperative than ever.

It’s one of the key elements in the development of the dynamic data center, and in being able to easily manage changes and maintain an optimal environment.

We’ll be at the Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks, at booth #211, showing off the equipment and software that we’ve developed to help you make your business as dynamic as your data center.  We’ll also be speaking about where our clients believe the data center is headed more than ten years from now.   Their input has proven critical in the past, and their thinking is helping us develop the solutions that will solve their challenges both today and tomorrow.

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IT departments today are all about speed – adding more applications faster to satisfy voracious global appetites for mobile, social media, streaming video and other resource-intensive applications. These applications must be available, regardless of their impact on critical infrastructure performance. If growth is stretching your resources too thin, you must take action to ensure availability. But because IT organizations are pressured to lower costs, you have to build an unassailable business case when deciding how to expand.

A variety of solutions are available for upgrading and expanding your critical infrastructure, including building a new data center, but how do you know which option is best?

Because you can take many actions short of building a new data center to improve your critical infrastructure, you may want to consider building new only as a last resort.
Building new is expensive and difficult. Factors such as getting a loan, finding a location and determining if you can get fiber optic cable all come into play. It can take three years before the new space is operational, and managing logistics for a move is challenging.

Still, there are times when building new is a good choice:

• Your business growth is through acquisition, and you need to consolidate a number of acquired data center You may have to build new to accommodate them.

• You don’t have a disaster recovery site. You can build new and use the old facility for this purpose.

• Your equipment is so old and poorly maintained that it’s not worth it to upgrade. Building new is an opportunity to take advantage of new, more efficient technologies.

Here is an interesting case study about Paragon Internet Group in the UK.

What about you? Have you assessed and optimized your existing critical infrastructure or have you preferred to invest in a new data center project?

Author: Paul Russell, Emerson Network Power. 
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