How infrastructure monitoring can help increase data center efficiency and availability

by Emerson Network Power on 2/20/15 8:00 AM

Written By: Diego Chisena | Emerson Network Power
During the first decade of the 21st century, the data center emerged as a significant corporate asset, playing a vital role in business management and customer service. Throughout this period, the data center underwent an evolution as computing and data storage capacities increased significantly.

Data centers have traditionally been designed with extra headroom to accommodate growth, but during the last decade, demand escalated so quickly that added IT capacity consumed available headroom and outpaced supply in terms of floor space and power and cooling capacity. This created conflicts as facility personnel struggled to supply IT’s demand for server capacity.

 

These problems were further worsened by two trends that emerged in the second half of the decade.

1. The first trend is the increased focus on data center energy consumption. With both the density and quantity of servers rising, data center energy consumption became a significant factor in terms of IT cost management and, in some companies, response to concerns about global warming. Early efforts to reduce data center energy consumption focused on lowering costs around data center cooling, which accounts for approximately 35 percent of data center energy consumption.

2. The second trend was the adoption of virtualization technologies. In a recent survey of data center managers, virtualization adoption rates stood at 81 percent. This has created a dynamically changing application environment layered on an essentially static physical environment, increasing data center complexity and introducing new challenges to physical infrastructure management.

In most organizations, data center managers lacked the tools to effectively address these challenges. The network management systems essential to IT personnel in monitoring and managing IT equipment did not address the critical issues of energy consumption, available rack capacity, or ambient air temperatures that are essential to proactive data center management. Further, the building management systems used by facility personnel to monitor power and cooling in the data center failed to provide the alarm management capabilities required for critical systems and to account for the interdependencies between systems. Evolving from a reactive to a proactive approach to infrastructure monitoring requires a new type of management system that provides visibility into the data center’s physical infrastructure within both the IT and facility domains and across these two domains.

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

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Topics: data center infrastructure, Data Center, data center design, data center energy, data center infrastructure management, DCIM, Trellis, the green grid, energy efficiency

Five Best Practices in Enterprise Data Center Design

by Emerson Network Power on 1/15/15 8:46 AM

iCOM_supersaver_CW-units

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/ 

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Topics: Emerson Network Power, Data Center, data center design, data center infrastructure management, energy, Uptime, monitoring, the green grid, cooling

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