How did it all get started?
How did we get to the modern data centre design? Why do most data centres look the same? Why are they so inefficient in how they consume electrical power? Why do they typically have a raised plenum...
View ArticleHow do I stop my DMX-4 falling through the floor?
Floor loading is a badly understood issue in Data Centers. Not just in the place where the equipment eventually ends up but also en-route from the loading bay to the final resting place. OK, so lets...
View ArticleFresh Air Cooling Revisited
I have had a great interchange from a subscriber to The Hot Aisle:- Darek Wichniewicz of ATM SA in Warsaw, Poland. Darek is looking for some real technical advice on building a new Data Center facility...
View ArticleKeeping your engines ready to go
If, like most of us, you use a diesel generator as a backup power source during electrical outages, you need to understand something about Data Center engines and how to keep them running sweetly,...
View ArticleUsing Absorption Chillers to Drive Energy Efficiency
One of the things that prompted me to write about CHP and Biomass was an email I received from a colleague, Howard Pheby of 5 nines. Howard, and his partner Paul Foskett, are announcing their plans to...
View ArticleHow to (not) make your Cisco 6509 spontaneously shut down
It’s not a new phenomenon, Sun did it over a decade ago with the 4500 range of servers that vent hot air left to right rather than front to back but it doesn’t make it any easier to run a complex site...
View ArticleFujitsu slip off whilst trying to jump on the green bandwagon
When was the last time you saw a Data Center press release that didn’t make some green or energy efficiency claim? I guess because data centers are such huge energy hogs vendors must worry that...
View ArticlePutting PDUs and CRAC Units outside the Data Center Hall
This is a picture of the corridor around the I.Net Data Center in Milan showing much of the M&E equipment that is normally housed within the data center hall located outside. So what are the...
View ArticleArchitectural Aesthetics can Minimize Cooling Efficiency
Dry coolers are used in many air cooled refrigeration systems. In case of low outdoor temperatures, outdoor air can be applied for cooling applications. In dry coolers, large fans create a forced...
View ArticleOverhead Cable Delivery
This picture is from a BT Data Center in Holland, just outside Amsterdam. There are quite significant airflow benefits to keeping power and data cables overhead and out of the plenum space under the...
View ArticleWhat is an Economizer?
HVAC Economizers (sometimes known as air-side Economizers) are useful for data centers which are located in regions of the world where the outdoor temperature is lower than the desired data center...
View ArticleHot Aisle Containment
This is an interesting photograph of a commercially available APC Hot Aisle containment system. With adequate cold air to our raised floor, this rack module can house high density equipment.
View ArticleCold Aisle Containment Curtain
A photograph from the BT Rochdale Data Center showing how the transparent curtains are attached to the roof. These curtains are used to separate the Hot Aisle from the Cold Aisle in order to drive up...
View ArticleSafety First
This is an essential piece of equipment in a data center. A device designed to lift and hold servers and other rack mounted equipment ready to install into their home rack. Without one of these (or...
View ArticleKeeping the Data Center Tidy
This picture comes from Craig Black and shows the most artistic cable management setup I have ever seen. Incredibly tidy and neat. Craig comments that “The horizontal stuff is Leviton and the vertical...
View ArticleHow not to do it
The photograph shows what happens when cable management is left to chance. The weight of the cables will put strain on the connections resulting in unexpected failures. Almost certainly the mess...
View ArticleAVIVA (aka Norwich Union) miss opportunity to Go Green
AVIVA (aka Norwich Union) is set to open its third data centre – Data Centre 3 (DC3) at the Broadlands Business Park near Norwich, UK this September. Although the site uses some modern design...
View ArticleIs there a DIY approach to Green Data Centers?
IT Infrastructure specialist Richardson Eyres recently issued a press release to help drum up some consulting business in the Retail market but make some generally applicable and interesting points...
View ArticleWhy your humidification plant is wasting electricity
Our atmosphere (the air around us) is made up of gasses consisting of nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%), carbon dioxide (0.3%) and water in the form of vapor (humidity). The amount of water in the...
View ArticleComputer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) Unit being installed
I took these photographs a bit over two years ago at the BT Reuters Data Center in Nutley New Jersey. They show a large CRAC Unit in the process of being installed. Note the copper piping, solder...
View ArticleCaltech adopts Hot Aisle Containment
The California Institute of Technology – also known as Caltech — is installing monitors and developing metrics to determine the efficiencies and savings of Hot Aisle Containment enclosures recently...
View ArticleVerari Systems Wins major Green Enterprise IT Award
I was delighted to hear today that my friends, David Wright (CEO) and David Driggers (CTO) at Verari Systems have been recognized for their great work on driving Data Center energy efficiency. For some...
View ArticleWhy legacy thinking costs performance, reliability and cash
I spend a lot of time thinking about data centers and how to make them better, more efficient, more reliable, higher performance , easier to maintain and cheaper to run. Lots of very smart and...
View ArticleData Center Scale Computing
Over the last few months I have been thinking about data centers, how we power and cool them and what we put in them. I’ve been looking at what the very largest consumers of IT infrastructure do with...
View ArticleCleansource UPS – No batteries – Just a flywheel
Sometimes the IT business and technology in general gets it right by looking back into history for sensible solutions to intractable problems. By combining modern engineering with old designs we get...
View ArticleInnovation obsoletes the data centre
Next week, Iceotope will announce that it has developed, patented and manufactured an extreme IT equipment cooling solution. The solution tackles the problems of cooling servers in data centres all...
View ArticleData Centre Dilemmas
I recently chaired a very interesting panel debate and discussion Hosted By BLADE Network Technologies in London. The panel was made up of: Harkeeret (Harqs) Singh, Global Head Data Centre Energy...
View ArticleHow do you currently choose where to place equipment in your data centre?
Recently The Hot Aisle conducted an online survey asking the question – “How do you currently choose where to place equipment in your data centre?” As usual we got a very large response to the survey...
View ArticleData Center Photographs
For years I have been a prolific photographer of Data Centres all over the world. I have hundreds of images, some brilliant, some out of focus and under-exposed, (I am a data centre guy, not a...
View ArticleKnowledge is Power
Back in 2008, Steve O’Donnell wrote an article here on The Hot Aisle explaining one of the challenges he set his team during his time at BT, the difficult task of getting Asset Management right. To...
View ArticleData Center Predictions for 2010
Around this time, analysts at ESG pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. One of my areas of coverage and of expertise is in the Data Center around power, cooling,...
View ArticleWhy storage will inevitably migrate to flash and trash
If you have been following the storage business for a while, you will have noticed a few changes: Introduction of Flash Memory components as Solid State Disks Serial ATA (SATA) disks becoming popular...
View ArticleASHRAE need to join the 21st Century
I don’t normally plug press releases straight from vendors but today I received an email from Emily Wood at Google with a message that I agree 100% with. Cooling data centers is not just about...
View ArticleSo you think you understand your data center?
Yesterday Chris Leahy (my Technical Facilities Manager) and I were agonising over why we had low plenum pressure in our Data Center and why we were seeing symptoms of hot air trapped in the roof void....
View ArticleInfrastructure Management White Paper
I just finished writing an interesting white paper on Data Center Infrastructure Management for Rackwise Inc. DCIM is not all about cost, although we would be remiss not to take the significant cost...
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