| Intelligent Containment - Beyond Hot and Cold |
Tuesday, May 10 Room 206 9:50-10:20 am
In this session, the winners of the 2011 Green Enterprise IT Award in the Outstanding Facilities Product in a User Deployment category will present their Award-winning case study profiling a facilities product that improved data center energy efficiency in a client installation. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's (AAFC’s) Winnipeg Data Center has been under aggressive IT load growth. Implemented 20 years ago with a six inch raised floor and the last cooling infrastructure upgrade done in 1999, the data center is currently operating well beyond its designed IT load. The first major cooling challenge halting growth occurred in July of 2008. Recognizing that the data center was operating inefficiently with significant cooling over-supply, a search was initiated to find ways to reclaim this lost cooling capacity. Standard best practices in air-flow management were successful initially, but a year later AAFC was again limited from further growth. A single Opengate “intelligent” active containment hood was introduced at this time and proved significant in not only allowing increased IT load, but also provided a number of additional benefits. Key benefits that enabled intelligent cooling decisions in this challenging environment were the ability to record and automate reactions to environmental metrics, and the threshold alerting capabilities of the system. Thus began the “Intelligent Containment” project, which to date has seen twelve racks retrofitted with six intelligent active hoods capturing the majority of hot aisle heat. This highly effective and easy approach has not only allowed IT load increases beyond what was previously possible, but did so without increasing cooling costs, enabling:
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