Electronics Protection - Spring 2015 - (Page 6)

Feature Predictive Modeling: The Next Frontier in Data Center Condition Maintenance Dave King, Senior Data Center Engineer, EMEA Future Facilities Steve Davies, Product Marketing Manager Future Facilities Given the pace of change within any company, the chances are small that the IT plans created by the design consultant bear any resemblance to the equipment that is installed in the facility. Add to this IT disparity the various energy efficiency drives which will have changed the infrastructure from the original design, and data center managers are left trying to fit square pegs into round holes. Adding more environmental monitoring will have yielded some useful information, helping to make a few informed choices that have reduced the number of critical events, but putting out fires remains too large a part of the job. Many of those fires could be avoided if the right information had been available. This is precisely what engineering analysis and predictive modelling does. Engineering analysis and predictive modelling are essential tools in a data center operator's fight against downtime. Data provided from modeling different scenarios in a Virtual Facility can provide crucial information that is simply not available using any other method. In addition, calculating your Availability, Capacity and Efficiency (ACE) Data Center Performance Score provides a simple way to analyze, compare and communicate the effect different options have on your very complex system. Understanding Predictive Modeling Predictive modeling is the process of using a computer model to derive information about the future state of a system, in this case a data center. This computer model is based on the mathematical descriptions of the physical components within the data center. While this sounds like a complicated premise, in reality you run models of this kind in your head all the time. For example, you know that to work out what the current draw will be in a particular rack after an installation, you just add the current draw of the new server to the existing current draw of the rack. That is a predictive model. You analyze this model to predict whether the breakers can handle the extra current when the server is installed and, if not, you act accordingly. Unfortunately, air is not as well behaved as electric current. The rules for working out how it flows around a data center are many times more complicated than a human can work out in their head. Luckily, the complicated rules needed to predictively model airflow are exactly the kind of math that a computer loves to chew through. This is where the Virtual Facility comes in. The Virtual Facility is an 3D computer model of the data center that is built by data center engineers at a predictive modeling firm and is then maintained by the facility staff. It will integrate with a current data center management toolset, be that one or more spreadsheets, or a full DCIM suite. The powerful computing engine built into the Virtual Facility, using well understood models of the different physical properties of air (temperature, pressure etc.), takes that 3D model and uses it to work out the conditions and the state of the cooling system. This data is then presented back in an easy-to-understand way. One of the major benefits in this system is that the Virtual Facility can be set up in any way and the conditions calculated and analyzed. This means that an operator can investigate any scenario the data center might be faced with. This can include future IT layouts, cooling failure scenarios, or energy efficiency measures. 6 Spring 2015 * www.ElectronicsProtectionMagazine.com An accurate Virtual Facility gives the operations team a window into the future; they can visualize the consequences of changes in the facility on the availability of IT, Figure 1. Take the laws of physics and the future configuration of the data center, then put them the efficiency of the into a 3D model. You end up with a model cooling delivery and that shows the impact of future configuration the remaining physi- changes on your data center's performance. cal capacity, before they actually take place. Figure 1. The ACE Data Center Performance Score At a high level, the data center is a trade-off between three intertwined variables: availability of IT, physical capacity and cooling efficiency (ACE). Running simulations in a Virtual Facility generates a great deal of data, and analyzing the information through an ACE score will help interpret it. An ACE score takes the information provided by the Virtual Facility and condenses it into three numbers and a triangle that conveys important information: 1. Availability - How much of the IT load is available under all designed failure conditions. Expressed as a percentage, this indicates any single point of failure in the cooling delivery system. 2. Capacity - The amount of the design capacity that is available for use. This looks into the future of the data center and tells you how far you will be able to load your racks towards the design value before hot spots prevent you from going further. 3. Efficiency - The efficiency of the cooling delivery. The ACE score takes the data center's previously established efficiency metric (Power Usage Effectiveness, or perhaps something more customized), and adds to the mix how efficiently air is being delivered to the IT. See Figure 2 for an example of an ACE Score. Figure 2. An example of a data center's current ACE score and the changes that would occur if a new cabinet layout was implemented. Data from the Virtual Facility as interpreted by the ACE Score shows a dramatic decrease in IT availability and physical capacity without any benefit to cooling. By modeling the layout in the Virtual Facility, the company avoids making a costly error. http://www.ElectronicsProtectionMagazine.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Electronics Protection - Spring 2015

Editor's Choice
Predictive Modeling: The Next Frontier in Data Center Condition Maintenance
Don't Forget the Batteries
Military Aircraft Power
Pumped Two Phase Cooling Solutions for Challenging Thermal Management Applications
Identifying the Ideal Mechanical PCB Hardware for Electronic Systems
Bridging the Technology Gap: The Importance of Cyber and Physical Security within the Data Center
Waterproof Mobile Device Protection without Compromising Acoustic Quality
Enclosures
Thermal
EMI/EMC/RFI
Power
Hardware
Contamination
Industry News

Electronics Protection - Spring 2015