By Kevin O’Brien, President - Mission Critical Construction Services Division, EEC

With growing costs of energy in their facilities, energy conservation seems to be on the top of the priority list for many data center operators.  According to Datacenter Journal and other industry sources, today’s data centers consume approximately 3% of global electricity and produce 200 million metric tons of CO₂.  And with the imminent growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, social media and cloud computing, our reliance on these energy hogs shows no signs of subsiding.  While companies strategize new ways to reduce the astronomical cost required to power today’s data centers, they now also have to factor in a more long-term concern – their facilities’ impact on the environment.  One quick way to improve data center efficiency is through the optimization of environmental parameters, specifically Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) / Computer Room Air Handler (CRAH) units.

At Electronic Environments Corporation (EEC), we consider ourselves to be the industry experts when it comes to the planning and construction of mission-critical facilities.  With proven methods, we have sought to not only assist data center operators with our services, but also to educate the industry on future trends including energy technology, cloud-based infrastructure, network virtualization and more – and the market is taking notice.

Last month, EEC was recognized among the 20 Designers and Builders within the mission-critical facility industry in CRN’s Data Center 100.  This list of the top companies is designed to help businesses discover the true experts in the field and ensure the overall efficiency, scalability and success of their facilities. Encompassing companies that exhibit a high level of innovation, technological capability and strong market presence, EEC is honored to be included among the best this industry has to offer.

By Kevin O’Brien, President, Mission Critical Construction Services, EEC

My experience in the data center industry goes back to the nineteen-eighties while working as a facilities manager for a large financial services company headquartered in NYC. Data centers were commonly located in New York City in the same building where their trading and office spaces were located.

The 1980s and 1990s
In 1988, we built our first remote site data center facility outside NYC, dedicated to only data and telecommunications. The site was an old ITT communication HUB in New Jersey that used to house the link for the ‘Hot Line’ between Washington DC and Moscow. Everything was pretty much analog in those days. Having the remote site allowed us to increase the redundancy and reliability of the electrical and mechanical systems. There was no Tier-certification system back then, but we were able to meet what would now be considered an equivalent of a Tier II standard on the electrical and even went to the equivalent of 2N on the UPS. The load-in data centers back then ranged from only 35 to 50 watts per square feet maximum. More and more companies began choosing remote sites throughout the 90s as fiber and demands for more computers at a higher reliability grew. It was not surprising that in 1989, the 7x24 Exchange started to publish articles and share common experiences on how to improve reliability. Then in the early 90s, The Uptime Institute was born, as was the creation and administration of the widely adopted, “Tier certifications”.

By Rob Aldrich, CTO and Founder of EcoLibrium Services, LLC. 
The second of a two-part series on data center capacity management.

Our best practices series continues. This post focuses on audits and getting organizational alignment to improve data center capacity. Best practices can be implemented by taking a holistic approach when evaluating your data center needs.

Regular Facilities & IT Audits

Do
Conduct quarterly or even monthly audits of electrical and mechanical system loading. Use the data garnered from these audits to establish trend lines on electrical and heat removal requirements for your data center. If you are not doing these already, the initial month will serve as a baseline reading that can be compared against. From there, it becomes a question of how you structure the data so that a range of users can interpret it across Facilities and IT operations.

 The first of a two-part series on data center capacity management.
By Rob Aldrich, CTO and Founder of EcoLibrium Services, LLC

There are several best practices that are often considered as an after thought to a sound capacity management strategy for today’s data center operations. Here are a few low- or no-cost ways to improve your approach to power and cooling capacity management. This is the first in a series of posts on data center capacity management.

Reporting
Do
Federate reporting out to both facilities and IT departments using a consistent data access, aggregation and reporting framework. Said framework should provide capacity measurements for each domain that are intuitive to the domain managers. For example, a server manager will want to see total, average server utilization. For servers, utilization is typically measure as a blend of processor capacity, Input/Output (I/O) and memory. By contrast, a facilities manager wants to see electrical and mechanical utilization of cooling and battery backup systems. For both domains, utilization can be expressed as a percentage of total system capacity. This reporting should be provided through a centralized portal that both facilities and IT managers can bookmark and set up notification preferences when capacity thresholds are exceeded. The best example of a high-level dashboard like this has been implemented by Dean Nelson at eBay. He has implemented a management framework that supports capacity management among others called Digital Service Efficiency (DSE). DSE is a free and open model that can be adopted by any organization today through the Data Center Pulse LinkedIn group.

By Jim Stark, P.E., Principal of Engineering, Electronic Environments