Industry Insight

Following the recent inauguration of Joe Biden as US President and the decision for the USA to rejoin the Paris climate accord, there’s a renewed focus on broader initiatives to address the climate crisis.

New research analyzing the actual cooling performance within live data centers for many of the world’s leading brands suggests that data center operators are missing out on proven ways of cutting cooling energy consumption by up to 30%.

Already 2020 is looking like it’s going to be one of the top five hottest years on record, with temperatures easily matching last year’s summer heatwave highs.

In the year that Amsterdam claims to be Europe’s largest data centre hub, the city government has in effect put the brakes on the construction of new data centres – a decision that the Dutch Data Centre Association (DDA) questions given the importance of the digital and IT sector to the area.

Optimising your data centre performance not only helps to remove business-critical risk, but is also a great way to provide demonstrable evidence of how you’re delivering against green initiatives.

Despite best efforts, even the best run data centres still have cooling and thermal management issues. With cooling now representing around 30% of a data centre’s operating cost, it’s more important than ever for organisations to be focused on thermal optimisation.

If organisations are serious about achieving new levels of thermal efficiency in their data centres, but are unable to remain focused on this singular aspect of their operation, they absolutely need access to meaningful real-time cooling data that they can use to apply to their space, power, cooling and other airflow dynamics.

It was great to have the opportunity to speak recently with Andy Lawrence from 451 Research. Andy is the Research VP for Datacenters and Critical Infrastructure at 451 Research, and he has had a long-term interest in data centre efficiency, and the convergence of IT and energy technologies.