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

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

Steps to Optimize Data Center Power

Posted by Dasha Bushmakin on Sep 20, 2013

Here are a few ideas for ways to optimize data center power:

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Tags: Data Center, Optimize, Power

Apple unveils 18-megawatt solar farm to power cloud data center

Posted by Dasha Bushmakin on Jul 27, 2013

Apple Inc. (NSQ:AAPL) said it plans to build a new solar farm with NV Energy Inc (NYS:NVE) for power supply to its new data center in Reno, Nevada, a major step towards its goal of having its data centers run on renewable energy.

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Tags: Data Center, Cloud, Power, Apple, 18-megawatt solar farm