Wednesday, January 27, 2016: 9:45 AM-10:45 AM
Fundamentals and Applications
Chair:
Nick Gangemi, Northern Air Systems
Technical Committee: 09.09 Mission Critical Facilities, Technology Spaces and Electronic Equipment
Reducing the environmental impact of data center cooling and the cost of operation is rightly high on the agenda. However, from a business perspective, it is important to recognize that actions to save energy may impact how much IT can be installed and whether it will be resilient when redundant cooling systems fail. Similarly, deployments of IT Equipment, and their in-cabinet configuration, may impact IT resilience, future install capacity and energy efficiency. This seminar addresses how IT and Facilities Management can work together to balance all 3 parameters and meet the business need.
1 A Holistic Approach to Characterizing Mission Critical Facility Cooling Performance
 |
Husam Alissa, State University of New York at Binghamton |
The main challenge in understanding cooling performance in a legacy data center is the invisible transport medium (air). This seminar describes a comprehensive experimental characterization of a new data center lab. Airflow and temperature measurements are utilized to understand the facility’s performance at different operational stages. Since the facility houses a wide range of different IT equipment (servers, switches, storages, blades), it is important to understand the airflow demand of each. The IT was tested and flow characterized. The characterization data is integrated via compact models into a full CFD simulation. Measured data from the facility are used for validation.
2 Analysis of Cooling Performance of an Enclosed Hybrid-Cooled Server Cabinet
 |
Kourosh Nemati, State University of New York, Binghamton |
Localized hybrid air-water cooling in server cabinets remove heat using a self contained system that does not interact with the room level air cooling system is one approach to more effectively control the cooling when there is wide variation in the amount of dissipation in neighboring racks. This seminar describes an experimental test and CFD validation of a commercial hybrid-cooled enclosed cabinet. The model includes fans and channels and the heat exchanger box and uses experimentally measured flow curves for the IT equipment. A sensitivity study was applied to the validated model to investigate the effect of leakage on cabinets performance.
3 Filling the Engineering Gap: Balancing Data Center Availability, Capacity and Efficiency
 |
Mark Seymour, CEng, Future Facilities Ltd |
DCIM provides tools to bridge the gap in terms of process and data communication between facilities and IT, but there is still a gap in terms of the engineering consequences of actions. This presentation will give examples of how common practices, at both the rack and the room scale (including the impact of choosing to co-locate different types of IT), can impact availability, capacity and efficiency in different ways. Metrics will be used to quantify the impact of proposed changes so that the business can make IT deployment and infrastructure decisions in a holistic way to fit its needs.