This is one of the key findings of a new white paper report published by Future Facilities, a global leader in data centre simulation software and an expert in facility lifecycle planning. The report, entitled The Elephant in the Room is Lost Capacity, highlights real world examples where capacity is rendered unusable. These include:
· · Failure to preserve much-needed contiguous U space as server racks are deployed without regard to the longer term implications of their placement
· · Failure to balance space and power availability through poorly conceived allocation of PDUs
· · Adopting a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to allocating network ports and power to cabinets, leading to under-utilisation of one or the other
· · Poor management of data centre cooling due to neither IT nor Facilities taking full responsibility for it
Dr Matt Warner, Product Manager at Future Facilities and the report’s co-author, comments: “We can see that it’s impossible to ignore the symbiotic relationships between space, power, network and cooling when managing a data centre. How each is handled has a huge effect on the others, making this a highly intricate and sensitive balancing act. However, the different parts of the data centre eco-system must be balanced in this way to extract full benefit from the investment made in the facility.”
The report goes on to use the Uptime Institute’s true total cost of ownership (True TCO) spreadsheet tool to demonstrate the financial impact of a 1.3MW data centre running under its design capacity compared with one running at 100% capacity.
Co-author David King, Consultant Engineer at Future Facilities, notes: “While the pace of technological change means it’s impossible to avoid some lost capacity, it can be minimised by looking more closely at the longer term impacts of technology deployment as well as taking a more strategic approach to the day-to-day management of a facility.
“Simulation techniques are the only way for data centre operators to gain a clear picture of the future state of their facility. With the growth of DCIM tools we now have the raw data to work with, while state-of-the-art CFD applications such as our own have the power to generate the modelled evidence to help prevent decisions being taken today that could have major capacity implications tomorrow,” he adds.
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Tags: Design & Facilities Management, Power & Cooling |
