Data Center Cooling:
Effective mission critical installations must address the known problems and challenges relating to current and past data center cooling designs. This paper presents a categorized and prioritized collection of power system challenges and requirements as obtained through systematic user interviews.
Despite revolutionary changes in IT technology, data centered cooling and products over the past decades, the design of power infrastructure for mission critical installations like data centers and network rooms has changed very little since 1965. Although IT equipment has always required electrical power, the way that IT systems are deployed today has created new power-related problems which were not foreseen when the powering principles for the modern data center were developed over 30 years ago1. In this paper, a systematic approach of identifying and classifying user problems provides insight regarding the nature and characteristics of power systems in next generation mission critical installations.
The one year survey utilized data center cooling costs and the voice of the Customer techniques, which relies on data collection of verbal and/or written responses to open-ended questions. This provides extremely unstructured responses, with the advantage that the responses are not limited or constricted by preconceptions within the question. During the course of the survey, some of the questions were expanded and/or changed in order to clarify ambiguous responses.
Results: Power System Challenges in Mission Critical Installations
Survey responses were grouped according to common concepts of data center cooling costs, and for each group a solution requirement, corresponding to a challenge for mission critical installation design, was derived. This process identified 22 core challenges. These core challenges were then further grouped according to theme into the following 5 key theme areas:
- Lifecycle Costs
- Adaptability / Scalability
- Availability
- Manageability
- Maintenance / Serviceability
For each theme area data center cooling requirements, challenges, underlying problems, and power system necessities are presented in tabular form. The highest priority problems are listed first under each theme. The priority was determined by combining number of mentions weighted by priority as expressed by the respondents.
Power Systems for Mission Critical Installations
Data Center Cooling Solutions:
A systematic analysis of customer problems relating to data center cooling systems and network room power systems provides a clear statement of direction for next generation mission critical installations. The most pressing problems that are not solved by current design practices and equipment have the common theme of the inability of the data center to adapt to change. Mission critical installation power systems must be more adaptable to changing requirements, in order to improve both availability and cost effectiveness.
In many industries, a maturity level is reached where new advances in reliability, cycle time, and cost require standardization, pre-engineering, and modularization. Designers of mission critical installations, designers of the power equipment used in them, and owners should consider whether this point has been reached. The results of the survey in this paper suggest the need for a new generation of adaptable power systems for mission critical installations.
