Keeping the Airflow Going in Smaller Data Centers

Just because a data center is small doesn’t mean that it’s not faced with the same heating and cooling challenges faced by data center operators running much larger facilities.

At the Data Center World conference in National Harbor, Maryland this September, Daniel Kennedy, director of sales engineering for Tate, a provider data center airflow management products and services, will showcase how one small data center operator saved on energy costs by reworking airflow through its data center that enabled it to shut down one of its coolers.

When it comes to operating a data center that may only be 1,000 to 2,000 square feet, Kennedy said, many organizations assume there’s not much to be done in terms of making the overall environment more energy efficient. In reality, that data center operators can increase the overall IT infrastructure density of those environments without actually increasing their energy costs or exceeding the thermal limits of the environment.

“Many of the operators of smaller data centers have not optimized airflow in years,” Kennedy said. “But it turns out they can take advantage of many of the same advances that have been made by larger data centers in recent years.

Despite the overall trend towards data center consolidation, Kennedy said, most of the smaller data centers that already exist are not going away anytime soon. Most of the organizations that run these data centers have already made significant capital investments in them. In addition, those smaller data centers tend to be in locations that for one reason or another are crucial the organizations that make use of them.

The critical thing, he said, is to get a better handle on the requirements of the application workloads actually running in those environments. Only then, says Kennedy, can the organizations that depend on those applications make the most efficient use of the space being allocated in ways that will be much more energy efficient that most organizations would have thought otherwise possible.

For more information, sign up for Data Center World National Harbor, which will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, on September 20-23, 2015, and attend Daniel’s session titled “The Small Data Center Efficiency Potential.”