With the introduction of a new generation of IoT enabled sensors, the fully-sensed data centre is on the horizon, bringing with it indispensable improvements in monitoring, management and maximisation of facility performance, writes Dean Boyle, CEO of EkkoSense
Despite the best efforts of their operations teams, even the best run data centres will inevitably end up with cooling, power and space issues to resolve. With cooling now representing around 30 percent of a data centre’s operating costs, it’s particularly important that organisations are able to concentrate on providing the kind of thermal optimisation approach that can remove thermal risk and unlock cooling energy savings.
However, if you’re serious about optimising your data centre performance then you really need to know what’s happening right now – not what was going on yesterday or last week. It’s only when data rooms are carefully mapped with all the appropriate data fields that operations teams can really start to benefit from a real-time understanding of their overall data centre performance.
That’s why – for true cooling optimisation – it’s necessary for data centres to start going further and getting more granular in a hurry. Because when a data room is carefully mapped with appropriate thermal data fields – right down to an individual rack or server level – a whole new level of understanding and cooling efficiency becomes possible which in turn enables the benefits to be maximised.
Getting serious about sensing
To address this, organisations need to work out how to build a rack-level detailed map of their data centre estate that displays all their cooling and thermal performance in real-time.
It’s only by then combining this kind of granular cooling and thermal data with smart monitoring and analysis software that organisations can start to track their data centre cooling loads in real-time – a valuable intelligence to enable thermal optimisation decisions to be made.
To achieve this kind of true thermal optimisation requires a proven, safe process that’s based on thousands of real-time sensors and expert spatial models that combine to remove the uncertainty from data centre cooling. Until recently this presented a barrier due to the market cost of sensors.