A Comparative Look at Five Major Design Approaches to Data Center Layout & Design

By John Consoli, Chief Technology Officer, AFCO Systems

Introduction

As one of Europe’s leading financial institutions selected a UK location for one of its new high-density datacenters, it recognized that proper cooling for the facility would be a challenge. The datacenter was slated to house nearly two dozen HP 7000 Blade Server chassis, each with over a dozen blades installed and running a variety of applications for mission critical trading and back-office computing tasks, plus multiple instances of VMWare for virtualization.

Challenge

Initially, the financial company considered using a liquid-cooled solution to provide the necessary cooling for expected 20 kW loads, but that would be an expensive and time-consuming option.

Solution

The European financial company needed an elegant and efficient solution for power and cooling of its critical datacenter. AFCO Systems’ Extreme High Density (EHD) datacenter enclosures were selected as the most efficient and cost-effective method for dissipating the level of heat expected to be created in the new environment without requiring the installation of a costly and complex water-based system.

Using innovative CFD modeling techniques, and with an eye toward developing a Green IT environment, AFCO designed a cold aisle containment (CAC) system in eight weeks and installed the necessary EHD cabinets in a single day.

In addition, the company is utilizing intelligent Power Strips from AFCO in conjunction with AFCO’s Resource Manger software to proactively manage the financial firm’s power usage. By being able to monitor its power right down to the outlet level, the financial company can obtain as granular a view to its power use as possible, enabling its datacenter IT team to take proactive steps in real-time for managing power consumption and cooling.

By selecting a system based on airflow management, instead of water-cooled, the company was able to realize an annual cost savings for room cooling of over USD $1 million.