Data Center Professionals Must Consider the Effect their Choice of Data Center Enclosure Has on the Hardware in their Data Centers

Farmingdale, NY (PRWEB) February 16, 2011

You may have the latest, greatest blade servers and network switches in your corporate data center, but are they really happy? “We don’t mean happy as in joyful but maybe more content and comfortable,” said Tony Wilson, AFCO Systems Senior Director of Marketing. “As a data center or facilities manager, you have to ask yourself if you’ve provided the right environment for those high-end servers you’re putting into your data centers.” To help information technology (IT) professionals make better choices about the data center enclosures they deploy in their data centers, AFCO Systems (http://www.afcosystems.com), the leader in green data center resource management, has identified Five Ways the Right Data Center Enclosure Can Keep Your Data Center Servers Happy. More information about AFCO Systems is available at http://media.afcosystems.com.

Five Ways the Right Data Center Enclosure Can Keep Your Data Center Servers Happy

They Keep them Cool. One way to keep servers and switches happy is to ensure they receive the proper airflow for cooling. An enclosure that manages and segregates airflow, keeping server inlet air at the optimum temperature and removing exhaust air properly, will avoid pressure build-up or short cycling.

They Keep them Accessible. Tangled cables make for unhappy servers. Make sure your server cables are kept away from blocking server airflow as much as possible. And ensure that your technicians can quickly access, replace or reconfigure cabling on demand without disturbing your servers. Use external cable management or sidecars to ensure access and mitigate airflow disruption to servers.

They Give them Room to Breathe. Enclosures should enable data center air-flow design flexibility. In a hot aisle / cold aisle (HACA) configuration, you’re managing enclosure airflow at the room level. You can increase efficiency by going to the next level and actually containing the air in rows of racks through aisle containment strategies. But bringing your containment strategies to the enclosure level allows you to gain the greatest control and server happiness. This means each enclosure becomes a mini data center environment.

They Keep them Monitored and Managed. Using intelligent enclosures with smart power strips and sensor networks, lets you to collect real-time power and environmental data. This can then be captured in a data center infrastructure management (DCIM) system to observe and proactively manage trends in your data center.

They Get Room to Move. Data centers are dynamic environments and servers are happy when they can be easily moved around. But moves, adds, and changes, can alter the heat density inside your enclosures. Make sure your enclosures can handle widely varying levels of heat density. If they can, not only will your servers be happy, but so will your data center managers.

“Following these common sense ideas can give you much happier data center servers and lead to lowering your costs associated with data center power and cooling,” said Wilson.

About AFCO Systems
AFCO Systems is a global leader in the design and manufacture of scalable enclosure technology for mission-critical data center environments. It has one of the largest globally installed bases of engineered enclosures for high-density server, storage, and network switch applications. AFCO Systems serves the blue-chip customers operating Tier III and Tier IV data centers across industries including financial services, media, manufacturing and education.

AFCO Systems’ Sigma-T™ technologies allow data center managers and IT executives to measure, manage, monitor, and maintain their overall energy efficiency in accordance with ASHRAE standards. Its patented systems control supply-air delivery at the enclosure level, providing cost-effective data center cooling management. AFCO Systems’ services include data center planning and consulting using CFD modeling.

The company is headquartered in Farmingdale, NY with global operating capabilities for its installations in North America, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit http://www.afcosystems.com or call 631-249-9441.

©2010 AFCO Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. AFCO Systems, Sigma-T™ are registered trademarks of AFCO Systems, Inc. All other trademarks belong to their respective companies.

Are you evaluating Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) systems? If so, you need to understand what you’re looking to “see” and what you’re looking to “control.”  In other words, what do you want the DCIM software to tell you?

Among the things DCIM systems can help you see environmentally are computer room air conditioners (CRACs) and computer room air handlers (CRAHs), cooling, power draw, and the effect of these systems on the temperature in your data center environment.

If you look at the issues DCIM covers–environmental and power management, the use of floor space in your data center and the nature of how you are populating your data center–you can draw a straight line to your enclosures.  Your critical technology and applications live there, and it’s where cooling is most required.  Monitoring down to the enclosure level is vital to the health of your data center.

DCIM is defined by Gartner as the integration of information technology (IT) and facility management controls to centralize monitoring, management and intelligent capacity planning of a data center’s critical systems.

Furthermore, Gartner predicts a 60 percent market penetration of DCIM by 2014.  This increase will be driven by increased power and heat density, data center consolidation, virtualization and cloud computing, they say.

The concept of the DCIM effort makes a lot of sense.  And the goal is achieved through the implementation of specialized software, hardware and sensors.  Correctly accomplished, DCIM enables a single real-time monitoring and management platform for all interdependent systems across IT and facility infrastructures.

Feedback from DCIM systems users confirms that it can significantly improve data center reliability and efficiency.  In addition to simplified and streamlined capacity planning, DCIM adds efficiency, flexibility, economy and comprehensive power monitoring that ensures the security and resilience of your data center.  DCIM systems enable users to understand overall energy efficiency and discover opportunities for recapturing power, cooling and space capacity.

Data center managers are demanding greater insight into the complex environments they manage.  As stated above, such monitoring should go all the way down to the enclosure level. DCIM provides the granular power monitoring needed to optimize power systems and report detailed usage statistics.  It allows data center managers to observe how much power their servers are using over time.

According to an article in GigaOm, the rapid adoption of open source innovation in the information industries has taken root and will continue to productively fester affecting the data center; a$50 billion market that is about to escalate at near warp speed.

ARM technology (formerly known as the Advanced RISC Machine) is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA). Just as open source software enables software programmers to leverage the work of others to deliver unique value within a common software architecture framework, ARM technology lets multiple ARM-licensed companies develop vertical solutions optimized for narrow problem sets around a shared baseline: the ARM architecture and ecosystem. And this baseline architecture is going to bring some fast changes to your world.

That’s right, the frantic pace of innovation more often seen in such products as mobile phones and tablets is maturing to the point where it is becoming very compelling to the conservative minded CIO and data center manager and the fiscally astute CFO.

The idea is that the Original Design Manufacturer combines the ARM core with a number of optional parts to produce a complete CPU that can be built on old semiconductor fabrications and still deliver substantial performance at a lower cost. And since ARM-based servers will require less power and space while providing greater performance density than today’s servers, get set to reap big capex savings. (ARM is for specific workloads that do not require access to memory arrays grater than 3.6GB, aka very specific workloads, like webserving, VPN appliances, etc…)

ARM technology in the data center: Loading many low powered processors into a single box to deliver significant computing power to the datacenter, and approaching a processor design with reduced power consumption as a primary design consideration, even ahead of performance. Both Lean and Green!

A major data center driver is the IT hardware Lifecycle, aka technology churn, and churn happens quickly. Your data center technology usage will change over time. Development in the ARM processor area may provide a way for the data center to keep up with technology churn and change.

With more efficient ARM processors in your data center, you need to ensure you have the resources to maintain all areas of your data center. ARM is great for specific processing tasks, but it can’t do the heavy lifting that blades do. You’ll need enclosures that can handle both scenarios, since you’ll probably have a mix of processor hardware in your next generation data center.