Protecting Your Data Center from Brownouts with Viridity EnergyCenter

A heat wave is a prolonged period of excessively hot weather that often comes with high humidity.  A very persistent heat wave, like the one we're having in the Northeast this week, can cause widespread power outages due to electricity spikes due to increased air conditioning use, which can lead to power outages.

If you're managing a data center, then you know that computer systems and other electronic storage devices are susceptible to data loss or hardware damage that can be caused by the sudden loss of power.

Protection from Brownouts 

Running Viridity EnergyCenter in preparation a brownout will help you know how much power the equipment in your data center is actually consuming. With this information, you can determine the actual power requirements that need be protected by the uninterruptible power system (UPS).  You can use this information to:

• Inventory data center assets including servers, power distribution units (PDUs), branch circuit monitors (BCMs) so that you know what you need to protect.
• Identify best placement for equipment. Efficiently place hardware based on rack space, rack power capacity, and server dimensions so that nothing overheats.
• Track top power consumers.  Know which equipment is consuming the most power so that you ensure that there is enough power to run them. 
• Determine how much battery runtime you need. During an outage, you'll need enough battery runtime to shut down systems or switch to backup generators.

With advanced planning and energy resource management software, you can reduce costs and downtime while resolving the most common threats to IT systems due to brownouts.

Notes From AFCOM's Data Center World 2010

Last week, I was at the annual AFCOM Data Center World conference in Nashville, Tennessee.  It’s a show that I had been to for many years while I was working for APC.  This is the first year that I attended it as a Viridity employee.  

My first thought at AFCOM was that it was great to see so many of the topics discussed in trade journals and analyst reports being discussed at the show.  Aisle containment, efficient air conditioning and sensoring and measurement tools were the big three solutions offered to try to solve perennial data center big three problems – availability, capacity, and cost savings.  

I understand how containment works for a lot of sites because the costs are usually moderate, upfront and have a positive impact on operational costs.  I get how VFD-driven, network-managed air conditioning is an obvious choice to replace older, less efficient systems.  I believe that the sensor offerings are gaining traction because data centers want to squeeze out more from the infrastructure either to realize energy savings or increase capacity.  

Of the sensor products I saw -- wireless, rack mount, or integrated with equipment - each solved some aspect of the power consumption or airflow problem, but none of them solved the whole problem.  The main issue with sensors is that most data center managers don’t broadly instrument their data center with them early on. Whether needed for temperature and humidity, power delivery, or air flow, deploying sensors gets either too costly to implement or too costly to maintain.  And often, the data collected from sensors gets dumped into a big folder with other data and clear, actionable information is impossible to extract.

Seems to me that to better way meet the needs of increasing capacity and saving money is to use a “do more with less” strategy.  Viridity’s EnergyCenter software offers this.  EnergyCenter reduces the need for most sensors because it understands and rationalizes IT power usage along with actual hardware utilization to provide immediate and actionable information.  And, this can be done without the heavy and invasive deployment and maintenance costs that come with trying to physically instrument a data center.  

This year’s trip to the annual AFCOM conference really proved to me what a simple, affordable solution we have at Viridity and how important it is for data center managers to take advantage of it.

Mike Tresh, Director of Product Management

Data Center Déjà Vu All Over Again

Recently, I found myself shivering under a blast of cold air in the second aisle of a Silicon Valley data center.   I did not remember it being so cold when we visited it the month before. Two tiles to the left of where I was standing, the temperature was a tropical 100 degrees!  It turned out the aggressive server consolidation project was under way and had successfully eliminated two racks of old servers. Unfortunately, nobody told the facility manager that the air vents freezing the open area of the aisle were no longer cooling any servers.

Fast forward three weeks and it was déjà vu all over again. I was in a large data center in New England and beside boxes of new quad-core servers were new racks that were being added to the aisles and the last row of the data center was Arctic cold. Not surprisingly, this data center was also running a frenetic “rip-and-replace” server consolidation project  at 10 servers/week, and the facilities folks had not changed the vent layout yet.  Fast forward another four weeks to a data center in midtown Manhattan, and you guessed it, it was déjà vu all over again! New racks were being added to the end of two aisles and no changes had been made to the perforated tile configuration!

I cannot blame the data center managers. They are putting in place new, virtualized servers with greater compute power density. Unfortunately, they don’t know exactly how much power each rack and each server within the rack actually consumes.  So, how can they be expected to know how much cooling they need or what to tell the facility manager?   When a data center manager finds a convenient empty rack space to add new servers or he or removes racks of servers to reduce total power, he is being efficient as far as he can tell.

If the data center manager had calculated the power usage effectiveness (PUE), before my first two data center visits, he would have realized that even if the total server power decreased, the PUE may not have decreased to the same degree if the cooling efficiency increased with the more skewed power distribution.  Unfortunately, the data center manager did not get the return on investment (ROI) on the new servers.  

So, what’s the poor data center manager and the poor facilities manager to do? I believe the answer is “know their data center.”   They need to monitor the actual power consumed by the rack and by all equipment in it. We know that the data center manager will be making frequent adds, moves, and changes as business dictates. But without real-time granular power monitoring, the data center manager has no idea how much power they need and how to distribute it until, as one manager put it, “the fuse blows.”

Aloke Guha, Viridity Software

P.S. Last week, I talked to the facilities manager at the Silicon Valley data center. When he proudly mentioned how the data center was being progressive by reducing energy and deploying new computer room air conditioners (CRACs), I told him about the really cold zones. He got defensive and mentioned he did not how what kind of kW that IT was using. “What about real-time monitoring?” I asked.  “Exactly!” he said. “That’s what we need if we can get it.”