Top 6 Ways to Improve Data Center Efficiency

Posted by Chris Parlee on Aug 26, 2015

By Daniel Bodenski, PE, LEED AP, Director of Strategic Solutions

The data center has become a staple of modern society, making the technology that we use every day possible.  Today, everyone from small start-up organizations to multi-billion dollar corporations utilize mission-critical facilities to house their vital data, and as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data continue to proliferate, our demand for more data centers will only increase.

With growing energy costs and data center energy consumption nearly 100 times higher than that of a typical commercial building, data center owners and operators are placing a higher focus on improving energy efficiency within their facilities.  Maintaining energy efficiency is critical to running a reliable, high-capacity, and cost-efficient mission-critical facility.  At Electronic Environments Co. (EEC), we are dedicated to enabling our clients to develop the most efficient and profitable data centers possible, allowing for maximum uptime while minimizing capital and operational costs.

When it comes to data center energy efficiency, there are six key ways you can improve your bottom line while still ensuring total reliability.  Below, we will examine these key strategies and help you answer the question, “How can my data center be more energy efficient?”

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Tags: Efficiency, Reduce Costs, PUE

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) Perspectives: How Key Data Center Stakeholders View PUE

Posted by Chris Parlee on Jul 8, 2015

Originally posted on Data Center Post, July 6, 2015

By Daniel Bodenski, Director of Strategic Solutions, PE, LEED AP

When analyzing the effectiveness of a data center, one of the most critical components to consider is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), a metric used across the board by mission-critical facility implementation teams, data center owners and operators, and C-level executives to assess a data center’s current and potential energy efficiency.  When used properly, this information can be leveraged to produce a stronger, more efficient mission-critical environment, gain a deeper understanding of competition, and open the door to exploring options for added efficiency improvements such as data center renovations, new builds, or migrations to the cloud or a third-party service provider.  In order for a facility to both evolve and adapt to ever-changing industry climates and customer demands, a deep understanding of what lies under the hood is vital to its success, and data center PUE is no exception.

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Tags: Energy Efficiency, PUE

Is an Integrated Paralleling System Right for Your Data Center?

Posted by Chris Parlee on Jun 16, 2015

By Chris Avery, Director of Strategic Products Divsion at EEC

When designing a data center and choosing critical hardware, it’s easy to see beauty in simplicity, reliability and cost-effectiveness. Today, technology has evolved to include a new approach to paralleled generator systems known as modular integration – a scalable, reliable and affordable solution to the traditional complexity within traditional paralleled generators.

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Tags: Power, Data Center Trends

Transforming Data Center Facilities to Optimize Energy Efficiencies

Posted by Chris Parlee on Jun 2, 2015

By Ken Rapoport, CEO of EEC, a member of the NTT Group that specializes in building and retrofitting data centers for energy efficiency

Many of our clients approach us for assistance in accelerating their energy-efficient data center journeys. Our advice to them is to consider the foundations upon which they build their data center facilities and the assets they deploy inside them, with reliability and energy efficiency top of mind. This will ensure that the data center is ‘ready to perform’ and can accommodate the needs of the business.

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Tags: Data Center, Energy Efficiency, PUE

Let Your Data Center Grow Efficient, Not Old

Posted by Chris Parlee on Apr 14, 2015

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.

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Tags: Data Center Maintenance, Data Center, Energy Efficiency, Datacenter, CRAC, data center energy, data centres, Energy, VFD

EEC Recognized in CRN’s Data Center 100

Posted by Chris Parlee on Mar 9, 2015

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.

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Tags: data center design, Data Center Trends, Build

Data Center Trends, Looking Back and Forward

Posted by Chris Parlee on Feb 2, 2015

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”.

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Tags: Efficiency, Datacenter, construction, PUE, HVDC

Data Center Capacity Management: Auditing & Alignment

Posted by Chris Parlee on Jan 13, 2015

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.
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Tags: Data Center, Management, Analytics, Cloud-Based, Data Center Management, approaches

Data Center Capacity Management: Monitoring & Reporting

Posted by Chris Parlee on Nov 25, 2014

 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.

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Tags: Cooling, data center energy, Power, PDU, capacity

How to Get the Most Out of Data Center Assessments

Posted by Chris Parlee on Nov 11, 2014

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

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Tags: Data Center, Data Centers, Upgrade, Tier, Standards, Readiness, assessment, MEP