Schneider Electric has added a new module to its data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) suite StruxureWare for Data Centres that adds intelligence to existing data centre cooling systems, enabling significant energy reduction and cost of operations, as well as reduced risk of cooling incidents.
The Data Centre Operation: Cooling Optimise module enables DC managers to understand the complexity of airflow within facilities, including all heat sources, cooling influences and dependencies, says the maker. It is a closed-loop system, meaning that it learns from any actions such as inlet temperature adjustments, or equipment additions, moves and changes to the IT load, to keep the data centre cooling continuously optimised.
Once deployed, Cooling Optimise enables operators to monitor the real-time status of data centre health and determine the impact of any cooling event. This also enables situations such as overheating, hotspots and capacity issues to be predicted and avoided. By continuously analysing use, future capacity requirements can be planned for, and stranded cooling capacity eliminated. Data Centre Operation: Cooling Optimise automates a response to changes in the data centre environment to reduce hot spots, where load requirement exceeds cooling, and wasted energy, where cooling exceeds what is actually needed.
“Most data centre cooling systems are specified to ensure that the hottest racks in the facility have a sufficient cold air supply. This results in a large amount of energy being wasted as the entire facility is over-cooled to provide this legacy design capacity,” said Soeren Brogaard Jensen, vice president, Enterprise Software and Managed Services, Schneider Electric. “For the managers of these data centres, it is impossible to consider how to reduce the amount of cooling without introducing risk of thermal shutdowns because they lack the information to do so safely.”
Schneider cites a recent case study where the system was retrofitted by a large Pacific Telco provider to automatically measure, analyse and control cooling output to match the requirement of a dynamic data centre environment. Piloted in a single room, the operator was able to turn off 13 CRAC units once installation and configuration was complete, saving 37% in average power use in the first year of operation.
“Through the combination of retrofit software which learns intelligently, and wireless sensors in data centre racks, data centre managers can quickly start to confidently operate their legacy facilities closer to ASHRAE inlet temperature guidelines, without risk to availability and without any investment in existing cooling systems. In use, they can anticipate up 40% reduction in cooling costs,” said Jensen.
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