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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With the onset of summer, minds start drifting to beaches and BBQ’s. But nothing can put a damper on your fun like an emergency at your data center due to inadequate maintenance of your support equipment.

Equipment shutdown is frequently caused by dirty condensers, clogged drains, reduced efficiency, and everyone’s favorite, water under the floor.

Dirty condensers can cost up to 30% more in energy consumption, over an identical system with clean condensers. When condensers are dirty, they do not transfer heat as efficiently as clean ones.  Which results in the compressor working harder by driving up head pressure.

By less heat being rejected with an air-cooled condenser, the heat will start to accumulate. This accumulation of heat in the condenser will make the condensing temperature spike, thus the pressure rise.

With the condensing temperature rising, there will be a point where the temperature difference between the condensing temperature and the ambient temperature (Delta T) is great enough to reject heat from the condenser.

The resulting higher exiting liquid temperature and pressure will also result in reduced efficiencies in the evaporator in terms of both latent and sensible head load capabilities.  

Here is a list of our top 5 maintenance items:

1. Inspect condenser and dry coolers for operation and squeaky motor bearings.  Clean as necessary but at least once a year.
2. Inspect belts for cracks, adjustment and glazing. Check the pulleys too. A worn pulley will just chew up a new belt. Change as needed but at least once a year.
3. Inspect and clean drain lines, traps and condensate pump if equipped. Replace cracked or worn parts.
4. Inspect filters. Seems like a no brainer but you might be surprise how many no cooling service calls I’ve been on over the years for iced up evaporators where the filter was so dirty you couldn’t see a locomotive headlight through it.
5. Inspect the refrigerant circuits loose or rubbing lines. Units vibrate and over time things can loosen up or start to rub together. Copper refrigerant lines can and will develop holes if left to rub against objects.

A routine maintenance program helps to reduce the chance of unwanted problems by having scheduled visits to your site to correct these sort of things before they pop up at the worst time. And as we all know all too well, that time is usually in the middle of the night on a Saturday. There are many more things a good tech looks for during maintenance inspections, for a complete maintenance plan, contact DVL Service.

M. Weis

SR Technical Advisor

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Data center infrastructure management tools offer real insight into your data center’s strengths and weaknesses. Using customized calculations to crank out actionable information, these interactive tools help you assess how each aspect of your network operations – your infrastructure design, energy consumption, heat generation and equipment expenses – are weighing on your data center efficiency and your bottom line.  CLICK HERE  to use one or all our our free tools!

Emerson Network Power and the Ponemon Institute worked together to determine the full economic cost of unplanned data center outages. Below is a preview, for the full report CLICK HERE. 

The 2013 Cost of Data Center Outages is the only benchmark study that attempts to estimate the full costs associated with an unplanned data center outage. According to the study, the cost of a data center outage has increased since 2010.

The cost per square foot of data center outages now ranges from $45 to $95. Or, a minimum cost of $74,223 to a maximum of $1,734,433 per organization in our study. The overall average cost is $627,418 per incident.

This benchmark analysis focuses on representative samples of organizations in the U.S. that experienced at least one complete or partial unplanned data center outage during the past 12 months. The analysis was based on 67 independent data centers located in the United States. Following are the functional leaders within each organization who participated in the study:

• Facility manager
• Chief information officer
• Data center management
• Chief information security officer
• IT compliance leader