Data Center Hot Spots Put IT Managers on the Spot

Airflows modeled to avoid meltdowns

By Patrick Thibodeau

May 28, 2007 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - When Roger Hardy, IT director for the city of Jeffersonville, Ind., gets an alert from an automated monitoring system that his data center air conditioning is failing, he has 20 minutes to fix the system before the computer rooms temperature reaches what he describes as its death point.

If the thermometer inside the data center hits 91 degrees, Jeffersonvilles IT equipment is cooked literally. Thats what happened this month when the city lost $20,000 worth of equipment after its strained air conditioning system shut down during a spell of warm weather.

Hardy, who is the sole IT worker for the community of about 29,000 residents, was getting the approval of city officials last week for adding more chiller capacity. That wasnt an IT problem he expected when he took the job in Jeffersonville last December, since the city built a new data center just last year.

Warm weather in Jeffersonville, Ind., this month overtaxed the air conditioning system in the citys data center, ruining $20,000 worth of IT equipment.

But Hardys predecessor died very early in the project. And later construction decisions didnt fully account for future cooling needs, Hardy said, adding that it wasnt until after he was hired that he discovered that the new computer room had only a fraction of the required cooling capacity.

To try to avoid unpleasant surprises like the one that occurred in Jeffersonville, IT managers are increasingly investing in computer-aided studies that map the airflow in data centers similar to the computational fluid dynamics studies that automotive or aircraft manufacturers use to see how air moves around objects.

Even if an IT facility has ample cooling capacity, it could still have heat problems if equipment isnt properly arranged. High-density systems such as blade servers are particularly vulnerable to airflow problems.

But airflow studies can cost as much as $150,000, said Mark Evanko, president and principal engineer at Edison, N.J.-based Bruns-Pak Corp., which conducts computational fluid dynamics studies as part of its data center engineering and design services.

The studies can be complicated, Evanko said. Assembling the data for a computerized model can involve going from rack to rack and verifying every aspect of airflow in a data center, he said. The modeling also has to be able to account for possible changes in a data centers configuration.

Question of Effectiveness

In addition, there is debate about how effective the computational fluid dynamics studies are within data centers. Studies of airflow look good, said John Musilli, a data center operations manager at Intel Corp. But at the end of the day, it only works when you have a pristine design.

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