Industry Insight

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.

Next week EkkoSense will be at the DataCloud Global conference in Monaco. It’s our first time at the event, and we’re excited to see how DataCloud’s C-level attendees will respond to key innovations such as Cooling Advisor, our new intelligent solution that’s built right into the heart of our EkkoSoft Critical software.

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.

While everyone agrees that effective cooling is critical to optimise data centre performance, it’s surprising how little emphasis organisations actually place on precision thermal monitoring.