How Important is Preventative Maintenance? Very Important.
Welcome to Keep Your Cool - a series tackling simple cooling optimization strategies for the busy data center operators.
Where do you begin when implementing a successful Data Center sustainability program? Well, you need to first figure what’s going on in your Data Center right now. You can do this by conducting a simple thermal survey. Measure everything (within reason)- the inlet and outlet temps, humidity, cooling units- so you know what’s happening.
It may be obvious, yet most operators can’t conduct these necessary preventative maintenance routines because they are so busy putting out the many other day-to-day fires. Today, I wanted to explore why you don’t want to wait any longer to conduct that benchmark survey.
From the moment a Data Center goes live, the environment will definitely change from the original CFD. Every server replacement, every additional cable—- any change you make to your data center will impact the cooling design.
Take for example one of our clients facilities. Over two years, we took consistent measurements at the top, middle, and bottom of the same cold aisle. As the client made changes to the environment, we could directly see the impact on white space.
At 6 Months, the aisle had a great uniformity metric. This is the key indicator of how evenly the temperature (or humidity or dew point) is distributed across the aisle. The lower the uniformity metric, the less distribution and the more efficient the aisle environment.
A year in, the client started to add some blade servers to meet demand. This introduced some hot spots in the left most corner of the aisle. The uniformity metric is still okay, but we are noticing some areas that need to be monitored.
A year and half in, the client had more blade servers and they started to experience more hot spots across the aisle. The uniformity metric went up to 1.86 and the client started to consider different airflow management solutions.
The client ultimately decided to install cold aisle containment. You can see that all the hot spots have been eliminated and the uniformity metric has jumped back down to “Very Good.”
As you can see, regularly auditing your aisles is necessary for managing your environment. Being proactive, let’s you identify potential problems like hot spots or overcooling— anything that may compromise the reliability and performance of your facility.
If you want to learn more about why you need a thermal survey or need someone to come and conduct one for you, please contact us today.
About Purkay Labs
Purkay Labs specializes in thermal surveys for efficient data center management. We offer practical solutions to optimize performance and sustainability. Partner with Purkay Labs for streamlined data center efficiency. You can learn more at www.purkaylabs.com.