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EC plug fans will do to the data center industry what the ipod did to the music industry. EC plug fans are, in a word, transformative. EC plug fans provide a new means of airflow through a CRAC or CRAH unit more efficiently, more evenly, and with significantly less energy than the currently adopted scroll fans. In what will be the latest toy for data center operators, the fans will be adopted quickly and enthusiastically. This post describes how these fans work and why they are so much better.
What do pilots, electrical grid operators, and data center managers all have in common? They all control a piece of equipment that cannot fail. A pilot error, large-scale blackout, or financial data center outage can result in unquantifiable costs. It is their job to ensure their equipment is operating sufficiently at all times. Given their focus on reliability, it is understandable why, at least in the case of data centers, not much attention has been paid to optimizing the efficiency of the data that is collected for these systems. This post examines how each operator manages critical equipment to avoid failure today and introduces a new concept of how more intelligent control using big data can improve both safety and efficiency profiles.
I am continually shocked that CIOs, data center design teams, infrastructure managers, and data center operators ignore the lack of cooling control systems in data centers. Data centers are mission critical facilities that require 100% uptime. Their cooling infrastructure requires continuous vigilant surveillance.
The cooling infrastructure for buildings, which are not mission critical facilities and can afford an hour or two of downtime, has been developed to monitor, control, and alarm when conditions become sub-optimal. Compared to the sophistication of building cooling infrastructure, data center cooling control systems are practically non-existent. In other words, if building cooling control systems just graduated with a PhD, data center cooling control systems would be stuffing envelopes as a college intern.
