Energy efficiency

Welcome back to our blog. On one of our last posts we are going to talk about energy efficiency. This topic has become every time more critical on data center design. Data centers are by far the main source of power consumption along the world which denotes it is a big think to consider on its design. Along this post we'll expose different factors and solutions that should be considered while implementing the data center design in order to be energy efficient. This factors and solutions can be grouped on this three topics: IT solutions, airflow management strategies and HVAC systems. IT SOLUTIONS As a great part of the equipment that will reside in a data center is IT related equipment, there are some guidelines to select both the devices and the implemented system in order to achieve a low power consumption or, at least, a low power waste. Virtualization is  a big factor on reducing the consumption of a data center. Since virtualization allows to detach a service from a single and separated computing device, it allows to reduce the number of hardware required to support all the necessary services. Very related to that are other factors that contribute to the waste of energy: lightly utilized or unused servers. Due to a lot of different reasons, being changes on the service requirements, workload or just because of a bad computing resources prevision, some servers may become unused or lightly utilized. That translates into a lot of energy to sustain very few operational applications. This phenomenon is mainly caused by a poor management or tracking of the systems mainly caused by a not enough automated and centralized management. Hence, decommissioning of the unused servers  wold be required to eliminate the consumption of those servers and with virtualization we could better manage the services therefore doing a more efficient use of the bare metal and reducing the number of lightly used resources. AIRFLOW MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES & HVAC Another of the main factors of energy consumption inside a datacenter is the cooling system. In order to maximize the performance of this system it is important to cool only what needs to be cooled. Hence, with this objective in mind the Hot Aisle/Cold Aisle layout that can be seen on the figure below is used. By using this layout all servers are refrigerated equally and there's a minimal amount of non computing volume that is cooled hence minimizing the cooling area which makes the energy required greatly lower. The addition of enclosures to limit the propagation of the cold air to areas of no interest will greatly increase the performance of the hot aisle/cold aisle layout hence minimizing even more the power consumption of the cooling system. To add to this there is a lot of complementary technologies that help increase the performance of the cooling system such as diffusers, vented tiles, ultrasonic humidification, variable speed fan drives...