News
Datacentres Waste Energy Through Overcooling
Lack of environmental management means that datacentre managers are wasting thousands of pounds on overcooling aisles in order to prevent hardware failures.
The research, by Dataracks, has found that traditional aisle designs result in areas of poor airflow, stagnant air, hot spots, excessive hot and cold temperatures and considerable bypass air. The result is that air temperatures can vary by 40°C between aisles.
As hardware failure occurs when temperatures exceed 30°C, datacentre managers overcool their datacentres and invest thousands in unnecessary standby coolers, chillers and CRAC units.
Jeremy Hartley, CEO of Dataracks, says that the findings would come as a surprise to many datacentre managers.
"Many of the managers we talk to have no way of measuring the microenvironmental conditions within the aisles of the datacentre. The consequences of downtime are so dire that they are persuaded to purchase additional infrastructure equipment, and overcool the datacentre as an insurance measure."
Following the research, Dataracks has started to offer an environmental monitoring service to datacentres, which enables management to analyse exactly the airflow problems within and between the aisles.
The problem is easily rectified and the datacentre could start saving energy within hours of it being addressed.
"Contrary to the views of many industry pundits, improving environmental management within the datacentre does not require a huge infrastructure investment,” comments Hartley. “Our consultants can recommend a solution that will pay for itself in weeks."
