Future Facilities and Partner to Productize ACE Data Center Metric

Future Facilities, whose software adapts 3D modeling concepts used in electronics design to data center management and design, has teamed up with data center infrastructure solutions company DCIM Solutions on a joint solution meant to help companies optimize efficiency of their data centers.

The solution is based on ACE, an approach to measuring data center efficiency Future Facilities created and has been actively promoting. ACE stands for Availability, Capacity and Efficiency. You need to take pulse in these three interdependent dimensions, the company proposes, if you want a true assessment of your data center’s performance.

The ACE model can also be used to make investment decisions in data center management with awareness of trade-offs. If you optimize for energy efficiency, for example, availability may suffer, since using redundant infrastructure components is by definition inefficient.

DCIM Solutions will now provide a service called ACE Jumpstart. Using Future Facilities’ software, the company will create a 3D computational fluid dynamics model of a customer’s data center that will visualize things like airflow distribution, temperature and hardware performance, among other parameters. The vendors will use the model to assess the facility’s state across the three dimensions of ACE and help the customer set ACE goals to work toward.

The service comes with a 90-day subscription of Future Facilities’ modeling software called 6SigmaDC.

DCIM Solutions Managing Partner Dan McDougal said the service will be helpful to companies that want to assess business value of their data center assets. “Using the ACE methodology, DCIM Solutions will be well-equipped to help data centers of all sizes plan for capacity changes and prevent negative trends before they begin,” he said in a statement.

Learn more about the product directly from Future Facilities and DCIM Solutions at next week’s Data Center World conference in Orlando.

Disclosure: Data Center World is organized by AFCOM, a Data Center Knowledge sister company