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