“The greenest data centre is the one you don’t have to build.”
That is the somewhat paradoxical claim made by Future Facilities, a UK firm that specialises in data design and trouble shooting.
The company uses its own complex modelling software to ensure that data centres can be designed to very high standards in terms of power, cooling and scalability, with a level of predictability that is unique to Future Facilities.
According to Jonathan Leppard, director, many data centres get to 40 or 50% capacity and find that they cannot fully utilise the rest of their available space as either power or cooling, or both, have already reached their limit. This is, according to Leppard, often because the equipment used in the initial phases was not properly modelled to know fully its impact before deployment.
Leppard says that Future Facilities can fully model almost any eventuality in terms of servers, switchgear and CRAC equipment to have full predictability. This means that a data centre can be used as it was designed, instead of wasting space or capacity when unforeseen limits are reached.
The company provides services in two primary ways, first of all in data centre design where its modelling capabilities can prevent the kinds of issues current data centres are experiencing; and secondly in troubleshooting facilities that have reached unforeseen limits and need to figure out why equipment is failing.
The ACE Performance Score is a predictive data centre performance modelling application that enables data centre owner-operators to accurately track and improve the performance of their data centres.
Critically, says Future Facilities, it allows them to do so in a sustainable and repeatable way, meaning that they can exercise much greater control over increases in downtime, cost per kW of IT load, and total cost of ownership.
“It presents a new way of assessing, balancing and visualising these critical indicators of data centre performance.”
The company cites some figures for the cost of failure. In an industry where the average TCO overspend is around $27 million (€19.5 million) per MW, where $/kW can spiral out of control within just a few short years of entering operation, and where the average cost of downtime is $627,000 (€454,500) per incident, owner-operators want solutions.
The performance score is derived from the three interconnected variables that ultimately determine how costly a data centre is: Availability (uptime and resilience), physical Capacity and cooling Efficiency (ACE). It presents a new way of assessing, balancing and visualising these critical indicators of data centre performance.
ACE Performance Score works by mapping data (for example, inventory and “real-time” power) from DCIM toolsets into a powerful 3D virtual facility model. With that automated process accomplished, it then simulates the resulting distribution of airflow and temperature in the space. This confluence of predictive modelling and DCIM data is called Predictive Modelling for DCIM.
“The people responsible for the operation of the data centre cannot predict the engineering impact of moves, additions or changes made to the IT load,” said Hassan Moezzi, CEO, Future Facilities. “In a dynamic environment, each and every change has an effect upon data centre capacity, resilience or efficiency. The ACE Performance Score will give our customers a way to assess how compromised their data centre is, to then improve it, and finally to maintain it in future operations.”
This is all possible, says Future Facilities, because the ACE Performance Score plots the data centre’s Performance Gap — the difference between maximum design potential and what can be achieved in day-to-day data centre operations. Once the performance gap has been identified, data centre professionals can make informed decisions about which variables to protect, which to sacrifice, where to save money, how to lessen the impact of change and how to ensure data centre investments are maximised.
The score is arrived at by means of Future Facilities’ ACE Data Centre Performance Assessment service. This measures data centre performance at any point in time, provides a comparison against the original design intent, and allows the owner-operator to decide which of the variables to protect and which to sacrifice in order to meet their operational goals.
And it is not all hot air, the company argues. In trials of the ACE Performance Score, Future Facilities reports that it saved a major financial institution $10 million (€7.25 million) by assessing and improving a single 2,230m2 data centre, despite being a well-run centre with an extensive DCIM toolset.
www.futurefacilities.com
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