It’s a question that comes up all the time. It’s also a difficult question to answer, because so many companies are secretive about their data center operations.

Emerson Network Power has put forth an answer to this question in “State of the Data Center 2011,” a report and infographic that summarizes data points about data growth, data center facilities and the cost of downtime. Emerson says there are 509,147 data centers worldwide, with 285.8 million square feet of space. Or in more familiar terms, there’s enough data center space in the world to fit 5,955 football fields.

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What are the Promises, Challenges, and Imperatives of Data Center Infrastructure Management?   IT and facilities organizations have invested heavily in technology resources (people, processes, and tools) to manage the data center infrastructure, they have failed to achieve the promise and potential due to critical gaps between their data center facilities and IT infrastructure components. A new perspective on managing the critical infrastructure gaps is emerging that recognizes: * The importance of real-time data to understand the true capacity of available infrastructure * The criticality of interdependencies between logical and physical layers * The need for holistic management capabilities and visibility of IT and facilities infrastructures * The need for more powerful management tools that offer a rich, visual view of the infrastructure and can guide design and change management

As we roll into 2012 a quick recap of the data center related events and milestones that shaped our industry are in order. Fortunately the good people at Data Center Knowledge already compiled a very fine article “Top 10 Data Center Trends of 2011”. In addition, you should examine the excellent body of work compiled by The Green Grid in 2011 especially in the areas of sustainability (WUE, CUE, and soon materials ala MRR) and workload analysis.

If you are making a list of action items and projects to tackle in 2012, one that really must be on your list is to JOIN the Green Gird and attend the members’ forum, March 6 & 7 in San Jose, CA. Email me if you don’t find a membership level that fits your business needs so we can explore other options.

Back to 2011, perhaps some of the most significant developments are the multi-faceted approaches that organizations began to adopt and deploy in earnest towards not only data center energy efficiency but perhaps more importantly overall computational resource efficiency. With the latter, computational resource efficiency (my term), moving to the forefront as the rush to virtualization began to wane in 2011 with many organizations having hit the ‘wall’ of diminishing returns for their efforts. Not that virtualization is dead by any means, it isn’t and properly integrated to one’s DCIM (new for 2011 and rapidly gaining share of mind) deployment strategy will better enable IT and data center professionals to finally place an all-in energy, material resource, and man-hour allocation to each and every VM instance, application, storage bit, and even data I/O network traffic.

[Jack Pouchet, Emerson]

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At any given moment, millions of financial transactions, e-mail, and online videos may be coursing through the circuitry of one of the massive computer server farms that have proliferated in the Internet age.  In Alfonso Ortega's thinking, it's a lot of hot air. He's not talking about spam.  

The Internet generates a huge amount of waste heat, said Ortega, a Villanova University professor of energy technology.  By some estimates, 3 percent of the nation's electricity is devoted to computer processing and data centers, enough to light up a couple of states. The cost of cooling the equipment nearly equals the cost of powering the computers that process the bits and bytes, said Ortega, who is also the college of engineering's associate dean for graduate studies and research.

"People started to pay attention when companies said, 'Wow, unbelievable, we're now eating up half of our costs just to keep this thing cool,' " he said.

Ortega's Villanova team, along with a consortium of four other universities and four area corporate partners, were recently awarded a five-year, $3.4 million grant by the National Science Foundation to study ways to improve energy usage at data centers. The effort is formally called the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center in Energy-Efficient Electronic Systems.  

DVL is one of the four area corporate partners, at the forefront of the data center industry research.

> Read The Full Philadelphia Inquirer Story Here

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Great Ideas To Design A Better Server Room

While increasing energy efficiency has been a growing initiative in data centers across the country, largely due to demands to “do more with less” in a challenging economy, an amalgamation of myths related to data center “greening” and a general lack of understanding of how to approach and achieve it has had a significant negative impact on the universal adoption of true “green IT” practices. 

Most data center managers have no direct visibility to the data center’s total energy consumption with respect to the IT and facilities infrastructure, especially when the data center/computer room is located in a mixed-use building. Fortunately, the emergence of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solutions is driving a paradigm shift where the gap between IT and facility infrastructures is being bridged to offer a holistic use of resource utilization throughout the data center.

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DVL Data Center Design and Best Practice Guide

How To Effectively and Efficiently Design Cost Effective Rack Rows

How To Select Cost Effective KW/Rack Designs

From Chapter 2 | DVL Data Center Best Practices Guide 

In recent years there has been an accelerating trend towards distributing power to racks through the use of overhead or under floor busway.  This trend has developed for the following reasons:

• Clutter and obstruction to airflow is greatly reduced in raised floor environments
• Wiring methods are simplified
• Future moves, adds and changes are greatly simplified
• Capital costs are reduced