Dessicant Technology Can Combat Summer Humidity Hassles In Facilities

- David Simkins, director of industrial services at Polygon US Corporation (www.polygongroup.us), says:

It’s a dilemma faced by numerous facility managers every year: sweltering heat exists outside, the building is becoming besieged with moisture inside and productivity is suffering.

 Too much humidity can produce a host of problems. For example, processes can be delayed or even stopped completely, machinery and electrical switch stations are liable to failure, and working conditions can become increasingly difficult. High seasonal humidity periods can over-tax an HVAC system, causing slowdowns or shutdowns, and the resulting loss of productivity, costing thousands of dollars. In addition, inventories can suffer moisture gain while in storage, mold can form, freshness or product appeal can suffer, packaging can deteriorate, and equipment can corrode. In addition, condensation causes corrosion of metal surfaces, such as the roof and beams, that can significantly reduce the life of the structure.

First, it’s important to understand why such problems are so prevalent in the warm summer months. As temperatures and humidity levels outside a facility significantly increase, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain relative humidity (RH) inside the building. The reason? Often, the temperature needed to maintain a low moisture level using conventional HVAC equipment exceeds the capacity of the installed systems.

What can one do to ensure business continuity when high temperatures and humidity are wreaking such havoc?

How to Maintain Effective Moisture Control

Desiccant dehumidification technology is the most effective method for maintenance of proper humidity levels in the hot, humid summer months. Using dehumidification on a temporary basis is a smart short-term solution and also gives building managers the practical knowledge to build an efficient, permanent solution.

 While mechanical refrigeration dehumidification can keep humidity at relative levels, it does so at a higher cost of operation and maintenance than other methods, specifically desiccant dehumidification. A mechanical system needs to sub-cool and potentially re-heat to achieve significant dehumidification. This process is very energy-consumptive and limited to the freezing point where the cool coil frosts and becomes a block of ice. Most mechanical dehumidification systems have low ambient control and will not operate below 45º.

 Many facility owners have discovered that desiccant dehumidification can more cost-effectively solve the humidity problems in a building, provide a more comfortable environment for workers and improve product quality by removing unwanted moisture.

 Desiccant dehumidifiers eliminate fog, condensation, and mold and mildew while reducing operating expenses. Desiccants allow facility managers to run fewer compressor hours while reducing condensation in the building, which also has a potential savings in structural repair and painting. The desiccant system maintains superior indoor air quality without sacrificing system performance.

 Another major advantage is the ability to deliver very low dew points necessary due to the high ambient temperatures and moisture experienced during summer. The system achieves lower dew points because the desiccant removes water in the vapor phase and is not limited by temperature. It removes moisture continuously without needing a defrost cycle.

 In the past, refrigeration cooling/re-heating units in a particular facility were not equipped to condition fresh air required under today’s building codes. Now, outside air is requested by current codes, such as BOCA 93, ASHRAE 62-89, that require central treatment of fresh air to meet the intent of the Indoor Air Quality Act.

 Typical HVAC systems use cooling coils to control humidity. That approach has limited capabilities and can cause many problems. Humidity cannot be controlled independently of temperature, so cooling-based dehumidification can result in over-cooled, clammy buildings during spring, summer and fall. This approach cannot maintain the low dew points required to optimize the energy usage of the refrigeration system. Overflowing drain pans and saturated ducts result, promoting biological growth that can lead to health problems.

 For example, in an ice arena, the energy peaks of the refrigeration system generally occur simultaneously with the peak outdoor ambient. This adds to peak demand charges and an increase in operating costs for rink operators. Using a less expensive natural gas desiccant dehumidification system can solve this problem.

To illustrate that point, a recent Concord, Mass., facility study that compared mechanical and desiccant dehumidification in an ice rink operation revealed an immediate improvement in humidity upon desiccant dehumidification installation and implementation. Conditions before activating the desiccant dehumidifier were 43º and 96% RH inside the facility. Six hours after initiating the desiccant dehumidifier, the temperature rose slightly and the humidity lowered to the desired set point of 50% RH. The dryer removed 800 to 1,000 pounds of water from the air. In addition, the rink enjoyed a total monetary savings of $12,000 to $15,000 during summer season by reducing refrigeration run hours for the ice sheet and the mechanical heating and cooling systems.

Steps to Consider

 No matter the type of dehumidification system used to maintain relative humidity in a facility, attention to other important can help maintain good moisture control during the summer months, and keep maintenance and operation costs from skyrocketing with the change of seasons.

Facility operators should conduct regularly scheduled maintenance. Regular surveillance of all HVAC and dehumidification equipment is crucial. The units need to be balanced and operating at 100 percent efficiency at all times. Don’t ignore the worn belts, high amp draw motors and warm bearings because those will be the weak points of the system when the heat and humidity return.

 Keep the facility well-sealed. Ensure doors leading to the outside do not remain open. Tight weather stripping is important, as well as making sure there are no holes on the exterior of the building. Revolving doors instead of standard “open and shut” doors help reduce humidity levels. If building walls are constructed of cinder block, cover the porous surface with a coat of vapor-retardant paint to reduce the internal humidity load and keep the facility comfortable.

 Reduce light. Light shining through walls and around windows and doors can cause moisture problems. If this is the case, seal in the area and minimize the source.

Reduce outdoor air. Outdoor air is required to meet IAQ standards, but it needs to be controlled. The best way to meet the standards and maintain control is through the use of a make-up air system coupled with a desiccant dehumidifier. An air quality sensor (CO or CO2) also is highly recommended. Monitoring the air in the facility is the most effective means of reducing operating cost while providing a quick response to the ever changing environment.

 Abundant opportunities remain for use of temporary dehumidification technology in manufacturing, processing, and many other industries. Personnel would do well to consider its use whenever weather variations affect workers, production rates or product quality, when corrosion or condensation cause problems, or whenever product must be dried at low temperatures.

- Davide Ortisi, marketing director at datacenter firm AST Modular (www.astmodular.com), says:

Major Russian telco operator Vimpelcom has released details for the delivey of a large scale modular cloud data center in the Yaroslavl region, Russia. The new data center will feature technology from Spanish datacenter firm AST Modular. The large-scale data center – whose first module’s delivery is set for early 2013 – consists of 6 modular customized rooms covering 3000 m2, with modules accommodating up to 1200 racks of equipment.

The datacenter will use AST Modular’s Natural Free Cooling technology with an expected cooling PUE of 1.09. NFC will allow Vimpelcom to dramatically reduce energy consumption and achieve great levels of security and reliability by avoiding airflow contamination.

The modular design by AST offers certified protection from fire, water, thermal effects, unauthorized intrusion and complies with all critical parameters in accordance with European and world standards. Each module can be quickly filled with IT equipment and comissioned indipendently without the need of waiting for completion of the entire facility. The datacenter has indeed been designed in order to scale along with Vimpelcom’s future business needs, thus minimizing upfront Capex.

This is the first Vimpelcom’s modular datacenter and will complement a portfolio of 16 bricks & mortar facilities which cover a total area of 17000 m2 split across Moscow, the Far East, Siberia, the Urals and the Volga region.

Part of Beeline’s group, Vimpelcom is one of the largest telecommunication and cloud operator in Russia. VimpelCom’s representative Anna Slastennikova declared: “The new data center is a key asset which will allow us to continue the technological development, optimize the existing network architecture and develop a line of cloud services according to our regional growth plan. We see demand for these services in the Russian market and Vimpelcom is actively working on the development of cloud solutions in Russia.”

"The modular data center construction model offered by AST Modular is very flexible and meets our objectives of improving opex whilst reducing construction time and datacenter power consumption” – added Vitaly Zadorozhnyi, director of operational risk at VimpelCom.

AST Modular is working together with its Russian partner LANIT to deliver the project. Valery Şincariuc, vice president of LANIT and Henry Daunert, CEO AST Modular jointly stated: "We are pioneering a new era in building data centers in Russia. Our modular datacenter solution is scalable, environmentally friendly and it reduces time-to-market. Modularity looks like one of the most promising approach in the field of high-tech data centers in Russia today."

Keeping IT Cool While Cutting Costs

- Dr. Eldad Levy, CEO, and Sofi Shtern, applications engineer at

CAS Ltd. (http://www.cas.co.il/old), say:

Data and communication intensive firms are facing a thermal crisis as their data centers are driven to deliver ever increasing performance. As power consumption per rack has risen dramatically, managers have turned to CFD (computational fluid dynamics),thermal software, to identify optimum cooling solutions.

Optimizing data center design is a challenging task, frequently requiring dozens of simulation models to zero in on an optimum solution. A fast, highly accurate CFD tool is a must.

Israeli consulting and thermal modeling firm, CAS Ltd uses CoolitDC from Daat Research (http://www.daat.com/), a powerful, user-friendly software that handles complex problems accurately and with a minimum of computing resources—only a laptop is required. Models often can be changed with just a few mouse clicks and the answer quickly recalculated. CoolitDC helped boost performance, efficiency and reliability of data centers at France Telecom (brand name Orange), one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies and at IDF (Israel Defense Force) Data Centers.
At the Orange site in Israel, two data centers had been built originally to handle low power density racks. Performance enhancements implemented over the years had pushed temperatures, at some points in the room, to borderline conditions. The inflow temperature of some racks reached 30 deg C, though the recommended maximum temperature was no more than 27 deg. C. As a result, the racks were populated only up to 2/3 their height because the upper area was too hot.

Each data center contained 80 racks cooled by four CRACs (Computer Room Air Conditioners) mounted in pairs at opposite ends of the room and pumping cold air under the floor. Cold air passed through the perforated tiles, entered the racks and then returned to the CRACs.

As with all their analyses, CAS engineers start by constructing a model of the existing data center and then calibrate the model by comparing its predictions against actual measurements. Typically models vary from actual by only a few percent.

To minimize redesign costs, CAS engineers initially investigated various options to optimize cooling using the existing equipment. The thermal simulations quickly showed that the data center was already at maximum cooling capacity and simple solutions, such as reshuffling servers and plugging air leaks, were insufficient to bring the temperatures down. Adding more powerful new equipment without making serious changes was completely out of the question.

The CAS solution was to create a “cold aisle” by enclosing the space between the two hottest center rack-rows with walls, doors and a ceiling. Inside the aisle, six in-row cooling units were added. To the client’s delight, the proposed solution proved very effective and equally important, was easy and inexpensive to implement.

At the IDF sites, the critical and often mobile nature of the military application demanded exceptionally high reliability from the data centers, which had to run cool even under harsh conditions, and made it impossible to incorporate spare capacity for backup.

A typical site consisted of a 16 x 12 m room containing 8 rows of racks cooled by 4 CRACs. This configuration did not provide uniform cooling and the tops of some racks exceeded allowable temperatures.

CAS investigated establishing a different mix of cold and hot aisles, reducing the air leakage and replacing missing blanking panels which were impacting the efficiency of cold aisle due to mixing of hot and cold air. In some instances, cold aisles not well sealed, were resealed to insure that no uncontrolled mixing of hot-cold air took place. Many other potential solutions were evaluated in a brief span of time: concentrating high power dissipating racks in one place, trying different perforated tiles to increase the airflow, checking different tiles arrangements, etc. All this required computing dozens of different cases in order to arrive at the optimal solution. Speed of modeling, both in making model changes and in actual computing of cases was of the essence.

A solution developed for one IDF data center required completely sealed cold aisles which eliminated all hot spots without any additional cooling equipment. In fact, the simulation showed that CRAC supply temperatures could be increased from 12 deg C to 15 deg. C. while still keeping inlet temperatures under 25 deg C. The design change resulted in over 12% energy savings which more than paid for the consulting effort.

In both the military and telecom applications, CFD thermal analysis eliminated guess-work in developing optimum solutions. Multiple “what if” scenarios were developed and modified with a few clicks of the mouse. Best of all, the investments paid for themselves through lower cooling requirements, energy savings, and reduced downtime.

Power and Thermal Management: Among Top 2012 Data Center Priorities

- Jeff Klaus, director with Intel® Data Center Manager (www.intel.com), says:

Power and thermal management in the data center are likely to be among the top five priorities in 2012 for data center managers. More detailed awareness and control of data center energy resources can ultimately help to contain energy costs, which are estimated to comprise approximately 70 percent of data center operational costs, according to the Forrester Research Report: “Updated Q3 2011: Power and Cooling Heat Up the Data Center.”

Without proper power and thermal management, overprovisioning of power/cooling resources in data centers is common, and has led to rising costs and underutilized space and equipment. According to a McKinsey study, $24.7 billion is wasted each year on energy and cooling for unused servers. It is estimated that in data centers, as much as 30 percent of the servers are “dead”—using less than 15 percent of their compute capacity, but consuming 70 percent of their rated energy capacity.

A nascent technology category, Data Center Infrastructure Management or DCIM, addresses the power/thermal usage information needs of facilities managers who are looking to operate their data centers more efficiently and cost effectively. Highlighting the growing demand in a December 2011 report, the industry analyst firm, The451Group, estimates that the DCIM market will grow by a factor of five between 2011 and 2015.

DCIM tools, when fed by real-time power and thermal consumption data, apply to many use cases in the data center, including:

• Measurement of energy usage by device;
• Capacity planning;
• Identification of dead and under-utilized servers;
• Identification of power/thermal failures;
• Improvement of thermal profiles; and
• Power continuity during brownouts/outages.

With its many use cases, DCIM is clearly a priority for today’s data centers. There are challenges to achieving real-time power and thermal management, however. Until recently, much of the power and cooling data available was not real-time data, but modeled or estimated, using face plate or manufacturers’ estimations of peak power usage. This estimated data has been found to deviate from actual usage by as much as 40 percent. Weather forecasting is probably the only industry that allows this large of a gap of deviation from actual conditions and still be considered successful!

A second challenge has been the lack of standards governing power data and the resulting difficulty in aggregating data from multiple, proprietary systems. Traditionally, data center managers have collected the data and manually aggregated it using spreadsheets or home-grown aggregation systems. More recently, some DCIM vendors have begun offering energy/thermal management platforms and analytics that are cross-stack, and therefore simplify data collection and analytics.

At last count, there were as many as 80 vendors touting DCIM capabilities, potentially overwhelming IT and data center managers faced with the daunting task of sorting the facts from marketing hype. Therefore, a first step in purchase decision making is to clearly identify how many and which of the DCIM use cases have the greatest potential for increasing efficiency and adding value to your individual data center. This knowledge may then be used as a litmus test when evaluating the information available from DCIM vendors, partners, ISVs and others.

Single-vendor data centers will do best to implement the DCIM tools integrated by the preferred server manufacturer. Managers of data centers with equipment made by multiple vendors will want to look for vendor-agnostic solutions that aggregate power data across their multiple systems.

Data centers with large numbers of legacy systems (equipment built prior to 2007) will have different requirements than data centers with newer, EnergyStar® rated equipment. Data centers facing energy audits or other government regulated energy restrictions may use DCIM tools to better grasp their actual power consumption and plan more strategically. Data centers nearing capacity may deploy DCIM to help determine under-utilized servers and thus increase their existing capacity through more efficient usage. Data centers in areas subject to energy brownouts may use DCIM to provide continuous, albeit reduced power, to ensure enterprise-critical servers are still processing as less critical ones are shut down during the outage.

With so many market drivers, DCIM is poised to introduce important technological advancements in 2012 and beyond, and will rightfully rank among the top priorities in the data center.

ABOUT INTEL DCM: Intel® Data Center Manager (DCM) has led the way in developing core technologies that will allow large enterprises to monitor, manage and ultimately reduce their data center power/thermal energy consumption and associated high costs. As part of a data center energy/thermal management platform or in combination with analytics from an ecosystem of third-party Intel partner ISVs, Intel DCM is the only vendor-neutral software that enables data centers to access real-time (versus modeled or estimated) power consumption data at the server level and implement controls to better contain costs and increase energy efficiency.

Data Center Cooling: Maximizing PUE and DCIE

- Marc Caiola, vertical marketing manager for Pentair Technical Products (http://pentairtechnicalproducts.com/), says:

Due to rising energy costs, coupled with increasing power densities of next generation data center equipment, data center and IT managers should rank high-efficiency cooling as a top priority. An effective cooling solution significantly contributes to maximizing Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCIE) performance within the data center. PUE and DCIE are similar, but inversely related, performance metrics. PUE is a measurement of how efficiently the data center and IT infrastructure utilizes its power (PUE = Total Facility Power / IT Power), whereas a low PUE ratio indicates a highly efficient data center environment. DCIE is a performance improvement metric used to calculate the energy efficiency of a data center (DCIE = IT Power / Total Facility Power) – a high DCIE percentage indicates a highly-efficient data center environment. Thus, low PUE and high DCIE performance measurements go a long way to dramatically reducing the energy costs associated with operating a data center.

In today’s technology-dependent world, a reliably operating data center is a core necessity for small and large businesses alike. Without properly running network systems, most companies simply cannot run at all. For many companies, the most significant challenges are adaptability and scalability – addressing both current and future thermal management requirements. Thus, data center cooling solutions need to be flexible and scalable while minimizing total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) challenges over data center infrastructure lifecycle.

Data Center and IT Managers can overcome challenges by conducting an initial energy audit. The energy audit should provide a comprehensive summary related to how much electricity is consumed by the data center and IT infrastructure. In many cases, data center and IT infrastructure energy usage can range between 8 percent and 30 percent of overall enterprise energy consumption. Additionally, managers should calculate watts-per-rack cooling requirements while identifying (and mitigating) hot-spots in order to isolate cooling issues and maximize cooling efficiency within the data center environment. High efficiency precision cooling, such as the POWERLEAN, can mitigate current cooling challenges while providing a future proof solution for data center cooling. POWERLEAN provides supplemental cooling and can be deployed at a close proximity to hot running equipment – such as high density servers – without the need to add (or modify) HVAC or CRAC cooling systems.

Data center and IT managers should address key questions when addressing cooling concerns within the data center environment. Some examples include:

• What is the cost/benefit associated with deploying the cooling solution vs. adding to existing cooling plant?
• What is the cooling medium – air-to-air, air-to-water, other?
• How much airflow (CFM) does the cooling solution deliver?
• How will the cooling solution improve our current PUE and DCIE?
• What is the power consumption of the cooling solution – watts/hr?
• What is the annual operating cost of the cooling solution?
• What is the noise level – how much additional noise will this add to the room?
• What is the maintenance schedule – how much (and how often) maintenance is required?
• How the cooling solution is installed – overhead, in-row, in-room, in-rack, etc.?
• Price is always an important factor, but it is recommended to factor the Total-Cost-of-Ownership throughout the life of the cooling solution as a part of the initial price.

POWERLEAN is a highly efficient In-Row or data room cooling solution that can be deployed in small to large data centers, wiring closets or server rooms.

POWERLEAN is an ideal solution for the following appications:

• Cooling rows of racks in hot aisle/cold aisle raised and unraised floor data centers
• Cool a modular data center with evolving requirements
• Cool rack equipment with higher than average densities or a mix of densities
• Cool “hot spots”
• Cool a small data room without having to install a CRAC system
• Reduce energy consumption
• Reduce noise levels (60 dBA at 1.5 meters)

High Efficiency, with low total cost of ownership – POWERLEAN provides considerable reduction in annual operating costs versus competitive in-row coolers. Furthermore, utility rebates may be available based on energy savings, and users are encouraged to check with local utility companies to determine if rebates are available. See cost saving comparison matrix (Table 1) – please note that energy costs will vary by state.

Hot-Aisle Containment vs. Cold-Aisle Containment: A Lesson In Efficiency

- Waite Ave, managing partner with Universal Network Services (www.apcdistributors.com), says:

High energy costs and spiking data center energy consumption rates have forced data center professionals to rethink their data center cooling strategies. Although traditional cooling approaches (such as perimeter cooling through a raised floor plenum) are still quite prevalent, new approaches such as hot aisle and cold aisle containment are making significant inroads.

Watch the Video from Hot-Aisle vs. Cold-Aisle Containment:

The Cold Aisle Containment System (CACS) is typically deployed in traditional perimeter-based cooling environments. Traditional cooling environments use the entire room as a hot air return plenum and use deliver cold air via the raised floor plenum to the cold aisles. The CACS encloses the cold aisle allowing the rest of the data center to become a large hot air return plenum. By containing the cold aisle, the hot / cold air streams within the data center are separated.

The Hot Aisle Containment System (HACS) encloses a hot aisle to collect IT equipments hot exhaust air and cools it to make it available for IT equipment air intakes. This creates a self-contained system capable of supporting high density IT loads.

Mixing of hot and cold air streams in the data center lowers availability of IT equipment. Returning the warmest possible air to the computer room air conditioners increases the efficiency and capacity of the system. The HACS ensures proper air distribution by completely separating supply and return air paths.

The design of HACS assimilates many of the advantages of the CACS and avoids many of the pitfalls. When upgrading a data center to be more efficient and less costly to operate, any move away from the traditional perimeter cooling approach is a step in the right direction. While CACS is a “better” scenario compared to traditional approach, the “best” scenario is embodied in a HACS system.

Are Your Data Center Monitoring Practices Putting Critical Operations At Risk?

- Kurt Crisman, marketing manager with Network Technologies, Inc.(www.networktechinc.com), says:

Temperature, humidity, and other factors can impact data centers, telecom switching sites, and other POP sites. In a many businesses, three groups monitor environmental threats to data center and switching site equipment: network administrators or operations managers, security personnel, and maintenance employees. Often, particularly in a small or mid-sized business, monitoring of equipment may be performed by staff onsite or visiting equipment in remote locations. However, these monitoring practices may be putting critical business operations at risk.

• Damage caused by the environment can be subtle, unseen, or attributed to other causes. Condensation, rust, and heat damage is usually hidden inside machines, out of human sight.
• The frequency and quality of a site check may vary from person to person. Even if procedures and schedules are in place, adherence to those procedures and schedules may vary.
• Environment threats occur 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But staff is not always on site. Depending on staffing levels and schedules, environments can be unmonitored up to seventy percent of the time during an average week.
• Without a log of changing conditions—temperature and humidity levels constantly increase and decrease—administrators and managers cannot identify problems caused by these changes. These problems can continue for days or months, while time and money is wasted investigating false causes and solutions.
• As soon as you have people checking on equipment or performing maintenance, you can actually create problems where they hadn’t existed before. For example, boxes set in front of vents “temporarily” are not moved.

An effective server environment monitoring system addresses the weaknesses in the current practice of having personnel monitor the environment.

Network Technologies, inc. offers a range of server environment monitoring solutions that monitor critical environmental conditions that can destroy network components in a server room or POP site. When a sensor exceeds a configurable threshold, the system will notify the selected administrators/staff via email, SNMP traps, Web-page alerts and a visual indicator (LED). The systems connect to your IP network, so they can be configured and monitored from any workstation with a Web browser. Event-triggered snapshots from an IP Camera can be sent by email.

Our products provide the following benefits:

• Control costs - In a stable environment, equipment lasts longer, and less equipment is damaged and needs replaced. Typically, the savings from not having to replace equipment can pay for the cost of the monitoring system.
• Increase lead-time to fix a problem - The earlier the warning alarm sounds, the sooner personnel can solve the problem before it becomes a disaster.
• Reduce downtime - Hardware housed at the recommended environmental conditions operates more efficiently, while also shutting down less frequently. Consequently, employees stay productive, and e-commerce sites continue to generate revenue.
• Log environmental data for greater insight - In order to maintain stable conditions in the server room, administrators must have accurate records of what has happened. Logging is also critical for investigating problems.

Lowering Cooling Expenses without Risking Downtime

- Jonathan Burk, vice president at Burk Technology (http://www.burk.com/), says:

Temperature monitoring throughout the data center facilitates efficient, cost effective cooling without risking hot spots and downtime.

Cooling costs in the data center can comprise a substantial portion of an IT department’s operating expenses. While guidelines for temperatures are slowly increasing and cooling solutions become more efficient, inadequate cooling still poses a serious threat to uptime and reliability. Simply overcompensating by lowering overall temperature is a costly workaround. The only way to be certain that initiatives to lower cooling costs will not adversely impact equipment performance is to monitor temperature in multiple locations throughout the data center.

Airflow problems and improper cool air distribution can cause significant disparities in temperature in data centers, as well as in individual racks. While some servers will perform normally, others in the same location may be degrading or outright failing due to heat related problems. When attempting to run a data center efficiently, a difference of only a few degrees in one area can be the difference between reliability and costly downtime.

More than ever, it is necessary to carefully monitor environmental conditions throughout the data center. Simply monitoring ambient temperature is inadequate, as rack density, ventilation and server load have a significant impact on server temperatures. Monitoring onboard server diagnostics, while necessary, will not differentiate between problems with individual hardware and an overall system or design. Depending on the design of the data center, temperature monitoring should be implemented in each rack or, at least each row. To ensure adequate airflow throughout each rack, temperature sensors can be placed at the top and bottom of each rack.

With over 25 years of facilities monitoring experience, Burk Technology developed Climate Guard to serve the environmental monitoring needs of data centers and server rooms of all sizes. Climate Guard monitors temperature, humidity, flood/leak and many other conditions that can adversely impact uptime and reliability. Climate Guard’s built-in logging allows IT and facilities personnel to spot trends and eliminate problems before they become disasters. The system alerts staff to out-of-tolerance conditions via email, SMS and SNMP traps.

For more information on Climate Guard and to see a live demo, visit climateguard.burk.com.

Solving Potential Overheating Problems

- Nazita Saye, Field Marketing Manager at Mentor Graphics (www.mentor.com), says:

American Power Conversion (APC) helped diagnose and solve a potential overheating problem in a customer's new data center by using simulation to evaluate alternative designs prior to installing the equipment. The simulation showed that the customer's original design would result in overheating if a single computer room air conditioner (CRAC) failed for even a short period of time. "We used Flomerics' FloVENT computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software to identify the problem, evaluate its root cause, and develop a new design that can withstand loss of any one single piece of equipment," says Ben Steinberg, senior applications engineer for APC.

Steinberg used FloVENT to model the geometry of the data center and thermal and airflow characteristics of the servers and cooling units. "FloVENT is designed specifically for modeling heating and cooling applications so it is both easier to use and more powerful than general purpose CFD codes when evaluating data center cooling," Steinberg says. "FloVENT also has a team of support engineers that provide excellent support because they have a very good understanding of data center cooling issues."

Like most new data centers, this one made extensive use of blade servers, which greatly increase the amount of computing power that can be packed into a given amount of space but at the same time generate much more heat than traditional servers. The customer's initial design positioned the equipment in three rows with one CRAC in each row. Steinberg ran a steady state simulation with all CRAC units operating and then removed the CRACs from the model one after another and reran the simulation. The results showed that when one particular CRAC unit was removed, temperatures quickly reached the unacceptable 90°F level.

Steinberg suggested adding a fourth row of equipment with a fourth CRAC unit. He pointed out that the fourth row would provide each hot aisle with one CRAC unit on each side of the aisle, providing redundancy in case one unit failed. In order to confirm this assumption, Steinberg modified the FloVENT model to add the fourth row of equipment and the fourth CRAC. The results showed that regardless of which CRAC was removed, temperatures remained at safe levels of between 75°F and 80°F throughout the data center. Steinberg showed these results to the owner and the owner made the decision to go with the new design and purchase the four CRACs from APC.

"It would have been extremely costly to install the equipment in the data center, run tests, and then discover that it would not properly cool the servers in the event of an equipment failure," Steinberg said. "But it would have been far more costly for the customer to have its data center go down because of cooling problems. This helps explain why we run simulations for many of our proposals. Simulation provides a fast, relatively inexpensive, and accurate method of evaluating data center cooling performance without going to the time and expense required to actually install and test the equipment."

Watch Out For Falling CFD Prices

- Arik S. Dvinsky, CEO and CTO, Daat Research Corp. (www.daat.com), says:

For data center managers wrestling with demands to increase performance, server hot spots remain the bugaboo. Would it be better to shift racks around, replace equipment or just throw more CRACS at the problem?

For some companies, CFD (computational fluid dynamics) analysis delivers the answer. Its 3-D models of temperatures and flow can replace guesswork with answers accurate within 10% or better. What better way to design new facilities or enhance existing ones.

Other companies haven’t been so lucky. They’ve been cheated out of the benefits of CFD because they thought it is too expensive. Despite paybacks—from reduced down time, lower operating costs, increased efficiency and improved performance, CFD has been, indeed, costly.

It is not unusual for a data center CFD consulting project to run $40,000-$80,000. And that is just the first time around. Often within months, some underlying assumptions in the analysis will change: power dissipation proves to be higher than estimates, new equipment is added or replaced with more powerful version and so on. The choice then becomes whether to re-hire the consultant or take your chances on equipment failure.

Instead of hiring consultants, you can license a CFD package and have in-house engineers run the simulations. Until recently, purchasing high-end CFD data center software cost as much as $60,000 per year. Less costly options, ranging from $20,000 to $30,000 per year, were available, but lacked the full range of capabilities and implemented simplified assumptions that produced less accurate results. Recently new full-function high-end data center software, CoolitDC, was introduced by Daat. CoolitDC runs on a laptop and sells for a small fraction of competitive products--advances built on the company’s 20 + years in CFD development for electronics. Now you can purchase high-end CFD software for well under $10,000 including training and support.

Increasing Uptime with Improved Environmental Monitoring

- Mo Sheikh, spokesperson for ITWatchDogs (www.itwatchdogs.com), says:

Workers and customers, empowered by smartphones and widely available Wi-Fi services, want and are demanding 24x7 access to email, company network resources, and Web sites. And thanks to today’s global marketplace, even small companies must support round-the-clock activities.

Unfortunately, IT system downtime remains a problem for companies of all sizes. A 2010 eWEEK article1 reporting on an industry study noted that North American businesses suffer an average of 10 hours of IT downtime annually. The article went on to note that this downtime costs small companies about $55,000 in revenue each year, while large companies lose about $1 million per year.

To avoid the problems that can cause downtime, companies need to closely observe server room environmental conditions and be alerted when problems arise. This is an area where ITWatchDogs environmental monitoring solutions can help.

Examining the Causes of Downtime

Several data center environmental factors can contribute to or increase downtime and service disruptions.

Heat can be a killer. Extreme heat buildup can fry a server, knocking it offline and perhaps damaging it permanently. Even moderate heat buildup can have an impact. Equipment failure rate doubles for every increase of 18 degrees Fahrenheit, according to studies done by the high performance computing researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Increased failure rate due to prolonged heating has also been noted by the Uptime Institute and others.

When it comes to monitoring temperature, it is not good enough simply to nail a thermostat to the wall. Since the temperature can vary drastically around different pieces of equipment, you should consider placing separate temperature probes within indi-vidual racks or critical devices. That way, problems with a broken fan or an air-conditioning failure will show up quickly. Similarly, you might be able to identify a server that is overheating due to it running excessive workload.

To take nuances into account, ITWatchDogs environmental monitors are designed for today’s crowded server rooms. They are small, ranging in size from only 4 inches long up to the largest models that are rack mountable at 19in/1U. The devices can run off of existing electrical power outlets, and many support Power over Ethernet (POE).

The monitors have built-in Web servers and use standard networking protocols, including TCP/IP and HTTP. This allows server-room administrators and their technical staff to monitor temperatures over an Ethernet network or remotely via the Web from anywhere. The information is presented in a manner that allows quick inspection of current temperatures, as well as historical data to help spot heating pattern trends. Finally, all of their environmental monitors are capable of sending alerts via SNMP traps, email, and SMS messages. Some devices can also trigger an external phone dialer to provide voice call alerts up to nine phone numbers, when pre-defined thresholds are exceeded.

Other server-room environments can cause downtime problems, and need comparable monitoring and alerting capabilities.

Humidity is another major threat. The reason: Humidity is the amount of water vapor in the air, and too much water vapor can form condensation on electronic components, leading to electrical shorts. If the humidity is too low, there is an increased chance of damage from electrostatic discharge. In either case, uncontrolled humidity can severely damage critical server components, causing the server to crash and shutting down access to applications and data.

Unfortunately, humidity is one of the trickiest environmental characteristics of a server room to measure and, as such, requires very close attention.

To measure humidity, most companies have focused on relative humidity. In fact, for years the guidelines followed were based on recommendations of the Ameri¬can Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). The group suggested that the relative humidity for computer rooms be within the 40 percent to 55 percent range. However, because relative humidity varies with temperature, ASHRAE now recommends that data centers measure absolute humidity, expressed as the dew point (it should fall within 41.9 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit).

As was the case with temperature measurements, humidity can vary significantly within a data center. So sensors must be placed throughout the room and server racks.

Water in a server room is never good news. Whether the source is a leaking or burst pipe, or a flood, water can easily shut down an entire organization. Examples include:

• A water main break in Texas took down the computer systems in the Dallas County Records Building. According to The Dallas Morning News,2 this “[crippled] operations for almost the entire county government.”
• Rains flooded a T-Mobile data center in the Pacific Northwest, taking down servers supporting the company’s service activation portals and web sites.

Water is usually measured using a cable that is run under an equipment room’s raised floor. When water comes in contact with the cable, an alarm is triggered.

Pro-active water monitoring should make use of sensors capable of detecting the presence of water over a large area so remedial action can be taken before it shorts out equipment.
A less frequent cause of downtime is fire and smoke. In 2008, a fire destroyed 75 servers, routers and switches in a Green Bay data center, according to Data Center Knowledge.4 Smaller fires and smoke from equipment or frayed wires can trigger fire-suppression systems which, while much better today at safeguarding equipment, can still cause damage to IT equipment.

To detect fire and smoke requires more than traditional building smoke alarms. The problem is that when they sense smoke there may be no one around to hear it. What’s needed is an alarm that connects to web-enabled environmental monitors. In this way, the smoke alarm works as it normally does, but its alert can now be sent via a SNMP trap, e-mail, SMS, and/or voice call to multiple IT staff members.

ITWatchDogs environmental monitors come equipped with various on-board sensors along with digital and analog inputs for external sensors, including tempera¬ture, humidity, water, smoke, and fire to name a few. The environmental monitors provide a way to remotely monitor server room conditions, view historical data to spot trends, and receive alerts when conditions exceed pre-defined thresholds. The information provided by ITWatchDogs environmental monitors can help a server room staff:

• Notice changing conditions and take preemptive action to prevent downtime
• Spot troublesome fluctuations and anomalies that might contribute to downtime
• Receive alerts when conditions warrant immediate attention.

Furthermore, ITWatchDogs climate monitors can be configured to display video feeds from up to four IP network cameras. The interface provides a quick view of remote conditions along with environmental measurements when logged in. For a manager working remotely or at home over the weekend, secure access to the interface is perfect to see who’s in the server room and check what’s going on from time to time. Upon alarm, a quick glance can also help determine if a trip to the facility is required or not.

And finally, when it comes to server room downtime, the elephant in the room is power outages. Power outages are the leading cause of downtime. Certainly, short outages can be covered with properly configured UPS systems. However, in some cases, a UPS might further contribute to equipment failure if it leaves servers running while the A/C remains off.

Naturally, if the power outage is longer-term for instance, a severe winter storm tears down power lines – knowledge of the extent of the power failure is essential so that backup plans can be initiated.

For power monitoring, ITWatchDogs offers the Remote Power Manger X2 (RPM X2). This adds remote power monitoring and switching capabilities to any ITWatchDogs environment monitors supporting a digital sensor port. The add-on accessory presents real time logging and graphing of voltage, amperage, real power, apparent power, power factor and kilowatt-hour to provide trend analysis and power metrics for future planning. The device enables users to set alarm thresholds for these measurements and it can remotely reboot locked systems or control system power via the secure user interface.

Your Technology Partner

To increase IT system availability, organizations need to take a proactive approach to monitoring the environmental conditions that contribute to downtime and disruptions.

Certainly, for years IT equipment such as servers, switches, and storage devices have had temperature and fan sensors, as well as software to send alerts when temperatures rise or a fan fails. But in many cases, these systems only notify you once a problem is severe. Additionally, these monitors only give you information about an individual device.

Proactively monitoring conditions in the entire server room or data center helps identify issues before they turn into a problem. This allows time to rectify matters before equipment deteriorates or fails.

ITWatchDogs offers a wide range of environmental monitors providing cost effective ways for server-room managers and their staffs to proactively monitor their IT infrastructure and maintain system uptime. The products provide a quick and easy way to keep an eye on remote conditions from a secure web interface and receive alert notifications when specified alarm thresholds are exceeded. The interface displays live video feeds and environmen-tal measurements including temperature, humidity, air flow, light, sound, power, water detection, and more. The measurements are logged and graphed for viewing trend patterns. External processes or applications can be automated on an alarm trigger or remotely through the web interface with units supporting output-relay control or with the Remote Power Manager X2.4

ITWatchDogs’ climate monitors use standard Web server software to display their measurements and camera feeds. All management and monitoring tools are accessible securely via Ethernet or the Internet; no software installation is required. The monitors have SNMP agent software to integrate with popular networking management tools, and they support SNMP v1, v2c, and v3.

Most importantly, the ITWatchDogs line of products provide the pro-active monitoring needed to maintain high availability in today’s data centers and equipment rooms.

* ITWatchDogs is a regular contributor on Data Center POST

1 “IT Outages Cause Businesses $26.5 Billion in Lost Revenue Each Year, Survey,” eWEEK, December 10, 2010 http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/IT-Outages-Cause-Businesses-265-Billion-in-Lost-Revenue-Each-Year-Survey-280492/

2 “Water main break cripples Dallas County computers, operations,” The Dallas Morning News, June 2, 2010 http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-countyflood_02met.ART0.State.Edition2.295d6ee.html

3 “T-Mobile Down Due to Flooding?” BRG.com, December 4, 2007 http://www.bgr.com/2007/12/04/t-mobile-down-due-to-flooding/

4 “Fire Destroys Wisconsin Data Center,” Data Center Knowledge, March 31, 2008 http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/03/31/fire-destroys-wisconsin-data-center/3 

How to Protect Your Data Center from Environmental Threats

- Mo Sheikh, spokesperson for ITWatchDogs (www.itwatchdogs.com), says:

Introduction: Physical Dangers Just as Important as Cyber-Threats


Viruses, spyware, and network threats get most of the attention, but environmental factors like heat, humidity, airflow, smoke, and electricity can be equally devastating to server room equipment, and thus to a company’s IT operations.

To get a sense of the danger, let’s take overheating as an example. Servers generate high levels of heat, and the facility must be kept cool to ensure optimal performance. The warmer it gets, the more likely equipment will overheat and malfunction. In fact, an increase from 68°F (20°C) to 86°F (30°C) can reduce the long-term reliability of electronic equipment by as much as 50 percent. And when air conditioning fails, temperature can skyrocket in a matter of minutes. In February 2009, Duke University Professor of Physics Robert G. Brown explained that heat weakens electronic components like power supplies, motherboards, and memory chips, so even if they don’t fail immediately, they become more susceptible to failure over time.

“The one time our server room overheated drastically, reaching 85° to 95°F (30-35°C) for an extended period of time…we had node crashes galore, and a string (literally) of hardware failures over the next three months— some immediate and obviously due to immediate overheating, some a week later, two weeks later, four weeks later,” Brown writes.

In this post, we’ll discuss the danger that environmental threats post to server room equipment, outline a comprehensive environmental monitoring strategy, and explain how environmental monitoring products from ITWatchDogs deliver an end-to-end solution for prevention and early detection of environmental issues.

No company is immune

Depending on the size of a company and its industry, downtime can cost tens of thousands of dollars per hour. For example, if your Web site is down and visitors choose a competitor, you’ve lost both the immediate transaction and the opportunity for their repeat business. If the outage causes your company to break a service-level agreement with a customer, the associated fees and potential lost business add up quickly.

Every server room and data center—even those of household-name companies and sites—is vulnerable to environmental damage. In March 2010, Wikipedia suffered a two-hour outage when one of its server clusters—located in a European data center—overheated. The company was able to reroute traffic to a North American data center, but a glitch in its DNS server tools caused Wikipedia address resolutions to fail globally. Think about how many users were frustrated by this outage. According to 2008 statistics, Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second. Multiplied by 2 hours, that’s at least 180 million failed requests due to overheated servers.

Lost business aside, you must also consider the cost of replacing expensive servers. In September of 2007, an overheating condition at St James Hospital in Leeds destroyed 1 million pounds’ worth of server equipment. The negative publicity surrounding the incident also impacted the facility’s credibility and public image.

Can your operation afford a large-scale server failure?

What’s clear is that companies of every size must protect their IT investments from environmental threats like overheating, power outages, and excessive moisture—all of which may result from flooding, condensation, leaks, or malfunctioning/poorly-configured air-conditioners.
Smoke conditions can also lead to serious equipment damage, in case alarms are triggered during off hours and personnel aren’t available to remediate or respond quickly. If a smoke alarm triggers an ‘emergency power off’ (EPO) device, for example, cooling systems could go offline and leave servers susceptible to overheating.

Environmental Monitoring Is the Key

In a typical server room, a wall-mounted thermostat measures room temperature and controls the air conditioning. Individual servers now come with built-in temperature sensors that issue alerts if the level of heat surrounding the individual unit rises above a certain threshold, or if an internal fan breaks down. Isn’t that enough to ensure safe operating temperatures?

The short answer is, no. Data center temperatures vary widely from one zone to another. Even if the overall room temperature is 68°F (20°C), the area near the output vents may be 5 degrees cooler, and the area behind server nodes may be 5-10 degrees warmer. Airflow problems could create higher-temperature pockets of still air in some aisles, creating hot spots that can damage sensitive components.

A better approach involves temperature/humidity/airflow sensors installed on or near individual racks and critical devices. Logging and graphing these measurements over time can help administrators spot trends, such as temperature spikes during peak operating hours or fluctuations when the building’s HVAC systems are throttled back on weekends.
With comprehensive monitoring in place, if an internal fan breaks or an air conditioning unit fails, the spike in operating temperature will be noticed quickly. Probes with internal microprocessors are easy to configure and highly reliable. Similar sensors can track humidity and moisture in the air and the floor, and measure the temperature and rate of air flowing along different paths in the server aisles.

Even sound sensors can help in the early detection and remediation of component failures. For example, a fan that is wearing out may get louder over time, which could be spotted at an early stage on a device that graphs relative measurements. A properly calibrated sensor would send out alerts for either condition and help IT staff resolve the issue rapidly.

The benefit of microprocessor-based sensors is that they can be monitored via Web browser, without requiring proprietary software installations. With a Web-enabled monitoring system, you can measure temperature, humidity, airflow, water leaks, power, door/cabinet position and more, setting alert thresholds and escalation schemes in case an anomaly is detected.

Optimal sensor equipment can send alerts in numerous formats, including SNMP

Best Practices for Optimal Monitoring

Heat: An optimal environmental monitoring strategy includes multiple temperature sensors. These should be placed on top, middle, and bottom of individual racks to measure the heat being generated by equipment, and at the air conditioning system’s intake and discharge vents, to measure efficiency. Probes should also be placed around critical devices, because the temperature inside a rack-mounted device could be as much as 20 degrees higher than the surrounding area. A probe near the room’s thermostat can help monitor what the thermostat is ‘seeing’ as it controls the air conditioner.

You can also use a hand-held thermometer to determine where the hottest spots are in the server room, and then set up sensors in those areas to get an ‘early warning’ when temperatures rise.

Once these sensors are in place and being monitored centrally from a browser, emergency alert policies should be set up to ensure that the right personnel are informed of potential problems. Remediation procedures should also be mapped out ahead of time. Service contracts with an air-conditioning repair company ensure rapid response, and you should make sure the company offers 24-hour service.

The logs that track temperature over time are also helpful, in that IT managers can review them over a weekly or monthly span and analyze them for spikes that occur during off hours. In addition, testing the sensors every month is an important step to making sure the system will function properly when an event does occur.

Water: Moisture and humidity sensors should monitor for leaks inside cooling equipment, potential leaks that come from nearby pipes, or water caused by a flood or disaster. Water sensors should be placed at the lowest point (wherever water would tend to puddle) on the floor, and underneath any pipe junctions. Air-conditioning condensation trays should also be equipped with sensors to detect overflow.

Power: Electrical failures can cause air-conditioning equipment to shut down even while an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) ensures that servers stay up and running – a sure recipe for overheating a server room in short order. The best approach is to monitor current coming into the data center, and arrange for an orderly shutdown of IT equipment in case power is knocked out. The hour or two of downtime is far preferable to the widespread device failures that would result from an overheating condition.

Smoke: Smoke alarms can trigger power shutdowns. Also, they’re usually not tied to an alerting system that contacts IT personnel. Alarms may be noticed by facilities managers—or the local fire department—but the maintenance of sensitive server equipment is not their top priority. Here, the best approach is to wire the smoke alarms directly into the climate monitoring and alerting system, essentially extending the functionality of the climate sensors to the smoke alarm.

Doors: A final concern for data center monitoring is unauthorized entry. Dry-contact sensors that detect the opening and closing of a door should be installed at the room entry points and on the doors of server and UPS cabinets. On a busy day, these sensors can send alerts numerous times and present a time-consuming irritation, but managers can configure alerts to account for weekday vs. weekend operations, work hours vs. overnights, and other factors to help reduce the number of alerts sent and pinpoint unusual activities.

IP cameras are another fairly easy component to add to a monitoring solution. They provide real-time surveillance of sensitive areas in the data center and tie into the Web-based console, so administrators can get a first-hand look at the environment wherever they may be.

What to Look For in an Environmental Monitoring Solution

A solid environmental protection solution should include sensors that are easily deployed throughout the data center, connected to a monitor with a built-in Web server for easy access and communication. It should also deliver:

• Secure, browser-based access
• Comprehensive logs and graphical analyses of environmental factors over time
• Multiple account levels, to ensure that IT staffers or clients see only what they’re authorized to see
• Multi-level alarm policies with escalation, so admins can set alert thresholds and contact lists for prompt response
• Multiple notification media, including e-mail, SMS text message, SNMP alerts, and telephone auto-dialer

Requirements aside, the solution should not charge subscription fees for tech support and software updates. A long-term data center management and monitoring solution is critical to preserving your IT investment, but it should not generate recurring expenses that degrade ROI.

The ITWatchDogs Solution

The ITWatchDogs family of monitoring devices provides remote monitoring of environmental parameters in data centers and server rooms. They track temperature, humidity, leaks, power supplies, door position and more. ITWatchDogs’ wide variety of models and options fit different requirements and room sizes, but all are based on standard hardware and software and monitored via a Web browser.

The environmental units are designed to take up very little space; the largest models are 1U high rack-mount units, the smallest is only 4 inches long by 1.5 inches wide and deep. Models with built-in Power over Ethernet (POE) capability are available.

All the products have a wide range of on-board sensors; most models allow 16 or more remote sensors to be connected as well.

All ITWatchDogs’ climate monitors have a built-in Web server that automatically generates sensor data logs and graphs, without any need for external software. All management and monitoring tools are accessible securely via Ethernet or the Internet. The monitors have SNMP agent software to integrate with popular networking management tools, and they support SNMP v1, v2c, and v3. Some models include low-voltage relay outputs that can be used to activate a strobe light, an alarm, a backup air conditioning unit, or an auto-dialer. ITWatchDogs offers highly reliable auto-dialer devices for both GSM and analog phone systems, with their own independent backup-power batteries which allow them to make phone calls to your IT and service personnel even in the event of a power failure.

Lastly, ITWatchDogs stands behind its products, with firmware updates available free on its Web site and technical support available free for life. Support is provided by the same engineers that designed and engineered the devices themselves, so questions and problems are resolved quickly and authoritatively.

Conclusion

Data center equipment is very sensitive and susceptible to environmental damage from excessive heat, moisture, and unauthorized access. Power outages that knock out cooling systems can lead to overheated servers in a matter of minutes.

Simple thermostats and server-based temperature sensors aren’t enough to ensure comprehensive protection. IT organizations need temperature and water sensors throughout the data center and at specific strategic locations near potential trouble spots. They also need door sensors and IP cameras to alert administrators in case of unauthorized entry and provide real-time views of the space. They also need comprehensive management tools to tie the data from these sensors together into a cohesive display, and to set alarm parameters in case a threshold is exceeded.

ITWatchDogs provides a full line of environmental sensors that deliver exceptional protection and alerting functions without requiring any proprietary software installations or update subscriptions. Regardless of your data center’s size or complexity, ITWatchDogs has a cost-effective monitor and sensor solution that will reduce risk and enable smoother IT operations for your company.

To learn more about ITWatchDogs and its line of monitors and sensors, visit www.itwatchdogs.com

* ITWatchDogs is a regular contributor on Data Center POST

Does Data Center Size and Shape Matter?

- Wally Phelps, product marketing manager for AdaptivCool (www.adaptivcool.com), says:

With IT equipment becoming both denser and more capable; many Data Centers while they face serious power and cooling challenges are finding space is becoming much less of an issue than in the past. The result for many is unused space in the Data Center. The other challenge many face is Data Centers being fit into existing office buildings into available space. Let’s address some of the issues these factors can cause.

How does a data center room's shape and size impact data center cooling?

Since air is the predominant cooling medium, its properties and characteristics must be understood to solve any significant cooling challenge. Data Centers move a lot of air so it’s usually turbulent; tumbling and swirling throughout the room which makes it hard to predict without the help of some tools like CFD. Laminar airflow by comparison is easy to predict but has limited application in studying Data Center Airflow.

Being a fluid, air will always take the path of least resistance. We like to say “Air is Lazy”. Room size and shape plays a big part in where this “Lazy” air chooses to go. Like herding cats it doesn’t always go where you would like, without a little help.

Before the consolidation takes place however there needs to be an assessment of the cooling available in the consolidated area and a study both supply and return paths. For the supply path Downflow CRAC units have a maximum underfloor throw of roughly 30-40 feet, (less if there are many perforated tiles in this path). This needs to be used as a guideline. Thus if you are trying to place IT equipment farther than 30- 40 feet from a CRAC there will usually be a problem. For the return side there needs to be a low resistance path for the warm air to return directly to the CRACs. If this air has to follow a circuitous path it will promote mixing and poor efficiency. Hot Aisle/ Cold Aisle configurations are of course recommended with CRACs at the ends of the rows. Often times there may be corners of the Data Center that have CRACs at right angles. Caution needs to be applied since these right angle CRACs can cause vortexes under the floor and reduce available flow from a few tile locations. To detect this, lift the tiles in the locations where perforated tiles are planned to insure there are no “dead spots” where cool air does not billow out of the open tile hole. If there is a dead spot, there are active underfloor air mover products that can solve this.

If consolidation is not possible then look for lower density portions of the room that can be targeted to reduce cooling air flow, so this capacity and energy can be used elsewhere. Of course

Factors to consider how COOLABLE a specific data center may be:

Rack layout – Hot/Cold aisle is best with long unbroken rows. Pay attention to maximum row length based on how far the CRAC units can throw air. A random or non hot/cold aisle layout will always compromise efficiency and capacity by allowing mixing.
Racks should be placed at least 6 feet from CRACs.

CRAC orientation – The CRACs should be at the ends of the rows to allow cooling and heat to flow easily in and out of the rows with the minimum amount of mixing.

Raised floor height – As a general rule a 10K sq ft data center should have a minimum of 2 feet. Smaller sites can get by with less, Larger sites need more.

Underfloor obstructions – Obstructions close to CRAC units cause the most problems. As you get farther away from the CRACs they become less intrusive. Cable trays and other large obstructions should be limited to the hot aisles if possible.

Shape - Square or rectangular rooms will usually be easier to cool.

Floor cutouts – These should be sufficiently small that excess air is not leaking out to spaces that don’t need cooling.

Ceiling height – Below 9 ft it is often difficult to get good return air paths.

Ducted ceiling returns or containment – Properly engineered these always improve the cool ability of a data center. Special attention must be paid to local fire code enforcement which varies widely.

Blanking panels – These prevent recirculation of hot air from the back to front of a rack. If there in not enough CFM being delivered to the front of the racks however blanking panels won’t help

If your Data Center is sub optimal in any of the areas above there are solutions that can remedy most if not all issues. Air is relatively easier to move than Facilities or entire rows of IT racks.

Enterprise Protection The AVTECH Way

- Michael Sigourney, Senior Product Specialist at AVTECH (www.avtech.com)

One of the worst issues an organization can face today is experiencing damage to their infrastructure. This scenario could result in thousands of dollars in lost revenue, productivity or important data. The #1 cause of unplanned downtime in data centers and other facilities where expensive equipment is housed continues to be temperature and/or other threatening environmental conditions including: power loss or failure, humidity, flooding, fire, intrusion or security, airflow, light and more. Because the average data center temperature will rise from the standard 68° F to over 85° F in about 8.6 minutes when a problem arises (i.e. power outage or aircon failure) the staff in charge must be alerted and take immediate action. AVTECH’s Room Alert and TemPageR products monitor for these conditions and alert users if and when a problem occurs.

After twenty years of software development, AVTECH has found themselves in the unique position of being the only true software developer in the IT & facilities environment monitoring market. This is a critical difference as hardware can be studied or copied to create similar products. However, it is the software that controls how a product works, provides the web or application interface, determines the level of reliability, and makes a product easy to understand and use for customers.

AVTECH Solutions:

PageR Enterprise (PageR) is a world leading software solution for network-wide server, device and event monitoring of multi-OS environments. PageR provides a central event console that can collect, filter and display status and event information for all server, TCP/IP, SNMP and other devices or issues on local or worldwide networks. Events, whether normal status updates or critical warnings, can be flagged to automatically and immediately trigger alert notifications to remote personnel via computers, mobile phones, email and more. PageR can even run scripts and commands or launch applications automatically when events occur.

PageR is very unique in the range of events and servers that it can monitor, from the basic "Are you there?" network pings to complex computer room environment monitoring, server or power crash detections, web page monitoring, "deep" monitoring on legacy systems, and much more. On Windows NT/2K/XP/2K3/VISTA/7 servers, any event written to an Event Log (i.e. System, Security, Application) can be used as a trigger for immediate remote notification and corrective action. PageR allows notification to individuals, groups, hierarchies, different people at different times and for different issues. Users can set up redundant methods of notification, scheduled checking, dependencies and blackout periods. And, if users need to connect to PageR remotely, like while visiting a remote work facility or from home, they can use the PageR web browser interface to make system checks or configuration changes from anywhere in the world via the internet!

Device ManageR also comes free with the purchase of any AVTECH IT & facilities environment monitoring product– TemPageR or Room Alert. Device ManageR is an all-in-one solution for discovery, management, logging, graphing, alerting and more. Complete with its unique range of features, Device ManageR runs as a Windows Service for security and is ideal for managing single or multi-unit deployments of Room Alert or TemPageR network-wide. Device ManageR automatically discovers units across the network and allows users to immediately be informed when environmental thresholds are passed (i.e. temperature too hot, power loss, humidity too high, water leak, etc.). Alerts are sent via email to mobile devices such as computers, mobile phones, BlackBerrys, iPhones, and PDA’s.

Device ManageR also allows users to automatically log sensor data for one click export, view graphed data over a user-specified amount of time with the ability to toggle between graph and sensor displays, monitor alert status for multiple units, set monitoring thresholds, set multiple IP addresses, update firmware and more. Device ManageR greatly enhances the value of Room Alert and TemPageR, making it easier for users with multiple units to discover, manage, update firmware, copy settings to multiple units, consolidate data logging and graphing, etc. Device ManageR also provides unlimited discovery of Axis Network Cameras and acts as a single interface for viewing real-time images for all cameras found on the network via a single IP address.

Room Alert 26W
Room Alert 26W is AVTECH's most advanced hardware solution for "IT & Facilities Environment Monitoring, Alerting, Automatic Corrective Action & Wireless Sensor Monitoring". As one of the first “wireless” environment monitoring solutions to hit the IT industry, the Room Alert 26W sets the industry standard for range of features and reliability. With the possibility to monitoring up to 86 total sensors (60 via wireless technology), the Room alert 26W allows users to monitor for computer room temperature, humidity, power, flood, room entry and much more in multiple locations while utilizing wireless sensor technology to reduce or avoid the hassle of running sensor cables. Room Alert 26W's Wireless Sensor Hubs (WiSH) and Wireless Sensor Hub & Powered Relay’s (WiSPR) communicate via a secure, private protocol that is ZigBee compatible, allowing users the ability to monitor large numbers of sensors both indoors and out up to almost a mile away. The Room Alert 26W package allows users to log environment sensor status for immediate alert notification, historical review and graphing. Alert notifications via email, email-to-SMS, SNMP and more communicate to devices like computers, mobile phones, iPhones, BlackBerrys, pagers and PDAs. Room Alert 26W comes standard in a 1U 19" configuration and offers an easy to use web browser interface for settings changes and viewing real-time sensor status from anywhere.

Room Alert 26W monitors environments such as phone or wiring closets, critical rack cabinets, large computer rooms or data centers, multi building facilities and facilities of all types and sizes. It is connected to the network via Ethernet and does not require a host PC for operation. WiSH and WiSPR sensors communicate directly with Room Alert 26W to monitor almost anywhere. This means inside a rack cabinet, air vent, sub floor or other location... even outside or locations where you can't run a cable.

Room Alert 26W includes built-in sensors for temperature, humidity, power and flood. It even includes a built-in UPS to get the alerts out when a catastrophic power failure occurs. Room Alert 26W is perfect for any location, although a must when running cables may be difficult or impossible. It offers enterprise level monitoring at a reasonable price, affordable for organizations of all types and sizes, as it lists for less just $995. No other product allows so many sensors to be monitored or includes the many options available with Room Alert 26W. It will help protect valuable equipment and other important assets to minimize downtime and reduce losses if a disaster does occur. It is the environment monitor of choice for today's most demanding IT & facilities manager.

Room Alert 26WO
Room Alert 26WO is AVTECH's Room Alert 26W… without wireless. It is designed to monitor computer room temperature, humidity, power, flood, room entry and more in multiple locations up to 900' away. The Room Alert 26WO package allows users to log environment sensor status for immediate alert notification, historical review and graphing. Alert notifications via email, email-to-SMS, SNMP and more communicate to devices like computers, mobile phones, iPhones, BlackBerrys, pagers and PDAs. Room Alert 26WO comes standard in a 1U 19" configuration and offers an easy to use web browser interface for settings changes and viewing real-time sensor status from anywhere. Room Alert 26WO allows for connection of up to 26 sensors.

Room Alert 24E
Room Alert 24E is AVTECH's advanced hardware solution for "IT & Facilities Environment Monitoring, Alerting & Automatic Corrective Action". As one of the most popular products in the entire industry and in the Room Alert line, it is designed to monitor computer room temperature, humidity, power, room entry and more in multiple locations up to 900' away. The Room Alert 24E package allows users to log environment sensor status for immediate alert notification, historical review and graphing. Alert notifications via email, email-to-SMS, SNMP and more communicate to devices like computers, mobile phones, iPhones, BlackBerrys, pagers and PDAs. Room Alert 24E comes standard in a 1U 19" configuration and offers an easy to use web browser interface for settings changes and viewing real-time sensor status from anywhere.

Room Alert 24E monitors environments such as phone or wiring closets, critical rack cabinets, large computer rooms or data centers, multi building facilities and facilities of all types and sizes. Room Alert 24E is connected to the network via Ethernet and does not require a host PC for operation. It includes built-in sensors for temperature and humidity. Room Alert 24E allows for connection of up to 24 digital and switch sensors. Switch sensors can be attached to monitor for conditions such as power, flood, smoke/fire, room entry, airflow and much more.

Room Alert 11E
Room Alert 11E is one of AVTECH's hardware solutions for "IT & Facilities Environment Monitoring, Alerting & Automatic Corrective Action". It is designed to monitor computer room temperature, humidity, power and more in multiple locations up to 900' away. Room Alert 11E allows users to log environment sensor status for immediate alert notification, historical review and graphing. Alert notifications via email, email-to-SMS, SNMP and more communicate to devices like computers, mobile phones, iPhones, BlackBerrys, pagers and PDAs. Room Alert 11E offers an easy to use web browser interface for settings changes and viewing real-time sensor status from anywhere. Room Alert 11E allows for up to 11 total connected sensors.

Room Alert 4E
Room Alert 4E is AVTECH's entry-level hardware solution for "Advanced IT & Facilities Environment Monitoring, Alerting & More". It is designed to monitor computer room temperature and other environmental conditions in multiple locations. Room Alert 4E monitors for conditions such as temperature, humidity, power, flood/water, smoke/fire, room entry, airflow, heat index and more. The Room Alert 4E package allows users to log environment sensor status for immediate alert notification, historical review and graphing. Alert notifications via email, email-to-SMS, SNMP and more communicate to devices like computers, mobile phones, iPhones, BlackBerrys, pagers and PDAs. Room Alert 4E offers an easy to use web browser interface for settings changes and viewing real-time sensor status from anywhere. Room Alert 4E includes a built-in temperature sensor and allows for connection of two (2) additional digital temperature and/or digital temperature humidity sensors, one (1) external power sensor and connection of an external light tower. Listing at just $355, it is the most cost effective environment monitor of choice for today's most demanding IT & facilities managers.

Signal Tower Combos
AVTECH’s Signal Tower Combos include all of the same features as the Room Alert 4E with the addition of an included mounting bracket, external tower light and tower light connection cable. They are designed specifically to monitor computer room temperature and environment monitoring in multiple locations up to 900' away, while visually and audibly alerting staff when issues or events occur.

Signal Tower Combos integrate easily with any SNMP enabled device on the network. The visual lights and audio alarms can be turned on or off via SNMP Trap or SNMP Set commands. This capability allows the Signal Tower Combos to be mounted in any location where the tower lights are highly visible and can be activated by alarms detected by the connected sensors or by other devices remotely anywhere across the network.

TemPageR
TemPageR is the world’s most popular hardware solution for "IT & Facilities Temperature Monitoring, Alerting & Automatic Corrective Action". TemPageR was one of the first products AVTECH ever developed and has continued to hold a strong place in the market today. At just $225, it is designed to monitor computer room temperature in multiple locations. Like all AVTECH solutions, TemPageR allows users to log temperature sensor status for immediate alert notification, historical review and graphing. Alert notifications via email, email-to-SMS, SNMP and more communicate to devices like computers, mobile phones, iPhones, BlackBerrys, pagers and PDAs. TemPageR 3E offers an easy to use web browser interface for settings changes and viewing real-time sensor status from anywhere.

TemPageR includes a built-in digital temperature sensor and monitors environments such as phone or wiring closets, critical rack cabinets, large computer rooms or data centers, multi building facilities and facilities of all types and sizes. TemPageR is connected to the network via Ethernet and does not require a host PC for operation. TemPageR is a high value, low cost solution; perfect for any SMB that houses critical equipment, sensitive to temperature and the environment.

-- AVTECH Software Inc. (AVTECH) of Warren, Rhode Island is a private corporation founded in 1988 that develops and manufactures hardware and software solutions designed to protect today’s advanced IT data centers and other facilities. AVTECH’s unique combination of hardware and software has led the company to become one of the fastest growing providers in the ‘IT & Facilities Environment Monitoring’ marketplace.

Current customers include every branch of the U.S. government and military, over 80% of the Fortune 1000, 37 of 50 states, all provincial governments in Canada, United Nations, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Google, Yahoo, Amazon.com, Apple, IBM, Hewlett Packard, UPS, Federal Express, Boston Celtics and many thousands more.

Data Center Temperature: Inherent Risks

- Michael Sigourney, senior product specialist at AVTECH (www.avtech.com), says:

ASHRAE has recently begun telling their members that data centers can run effectively at higher temperatures and that doing so will reduce power consumption due to a lower need for cooling. It seems obvious that this will occur although many users have been reserved in recent years to let data centers run above 68-70 degrees. There will be inherent risks, naturally, although cash flow is important to business and power is a major expense all data centers wrestle with. Even worse, power may become more and more of a limited resource in the future and some locations may not have extra capacity to expand a facility. Therefore, learning to reduce power usage or dependency is prudent.

Warmer data centers is a concept that surely must be examined, although many will concede is easier to do when you have the staff and financial resource that Google has. Hot swapping disks or CPUs that fail is easy when you have standby units by the dozens and staff working around the clock. However, that is not the case for 99% of the data centers I have spoken with and if something goes bad at an inconvenient time, then the damage can be exponential and catastrophic.

Risks when raising the temperature. AVTECH believes the risks are similar for a data center at 70 degrees as it may be at 78 degrees... bad things just happen a lot faster and more frequently when temperatures rise dramatically over a large population of data centers. Sure, some sites get lucky and never seem to have issues. That is statistically unlikely however and experienced IT managers know it. Therefore, dealing with an increase in temperature for the data center is similar to investing your pension fund. A manager has to answer honestly to themselves as to how much risk they want to take on?

The basics stay the same, increases in temperature will stress components towards the upper limit of the recommended environmental parameters they were designed to operate under. This can short out circuit boards, change the physical shape of small and fast moving parts causing parts to "crash" or break, allow solder "creep" to weaken signal strength or create irregularities in data transfer, cause static electricity if humidity is too dry and more. Most of this can happen while a manager is standing right in front of the hardware and is almost invisible to see until something breaks. When that happens, whether a manager is on site or somewhere else, the bottom line is they need to know immediately to prevent compounding the costs or damage.

Raising the temperature does not cause a need for environmental monitoring equipment although the resulting long term effects of periodically losing equipment unexpectedly does. Most people agree that no matter where you set the thermostat, changes in those conditions mean the resulting risk to expensive IT equipment is changing. When this happens, the IT manager and support team need to know. Finding out about a problem after the fact instead of as it is developing is expensive and can lead to a lifetime subscription to Monster.com. IT managers can only be in control when they know what is happening as it is happening and AVTECH has built a business helping managers know immediately and then resolve issues with our Room Alert and TemPageR products. Going without environment monitoring, whether it is an AVTECH product or someone else's, would be like sending you son to college in the family car with no insurance and beer money in his pocket... not a decision you'll look back on with pride.

As temperatures rise, risk increases and the length of "forgiveness time" is reduced. There has never been a more important argument for immediate alerting and detailed monitoring than in todays data center. IT managers must have a detailed understanding of both what is going on in their data center and how the data center changes conditionally over time. Different environmental conditions occur at different times of the year, as new equipment is added, and as mother nature changes the world around us. As almost every company depends unconditionally on being online, available and fully operational, the pressure for IT managers just continues to increase. Automation with advanced tools is important for environmental monitoring and many other applications.

The changing environmental data should be logged automatically into a system with graphing available so that when a need to review and make changes occurs, everything is at hand. All sensor data should be kept in a central repository that is available from anywhere for instant review and analysis. Even more important is an advanced alerting system that allows different environment thresholds for different sensors with escalating alerts to different people at different times. AVTECH's new Device ManageR is the model software package for todays IT or facilities manager. No longer can an organization go with basic network monitoring software where environmental monitoring for the data center is piggybacked onto an overloaded "generic" alerting system. Advanced alerting with flexible and easy setup is expected and the software needs to be able to complete automatic server shutdowns, system reboots, log off users and more. These actions need to occur in real time in order to address critical situations. These environment monitors also need to be integrated with power products and relays to enable lights, audio alarms, fans, backup generators and more.

AVTECH is proud to be on the leading edge of development and a market leader in environment monitoring.