As businesses become more reliant on data centres, it is becoming increasingly important that they are operating at peak performance, and that any downtime or disruptions are minimised. In order to keep data centres working to the best of their capacity, an efficient cooling system is indispensable.
Waste production (heat)
Data centres consume a lot of electrical power and a byproduct of this intense consumption is the production of heat and, as most people know, electrical equipment and heat do not mix very well. You need only think of your laptop fan kicking in when it overheats to know that, like your laptop, a data centre needs to be kept below (and above!) a certain temperature.
Because data centers are usually housed in small enclosed spaces, there is nowhere for the heat to escape through, which can lead to the temperature in the room rising to the point where it damages or even destroys valuable equipment. This is why an efficient cooling and air condition system is so important in a data centre.
If you already have a data centre you use, you should possibly think of starting data centre migration, this is the process of deploying and transferring an existing data centre to another data centre.
Downtime
As businesses continue to migrate to cloud computing and cloud storage and are required to be connected to their customers, each other, and the world 24/7, they are becoming more and more reliant on their data centres. What this means is that the cost of any outages or server downtime is now far greater than it was in the past.
Although not the only cause of downtime, overheating can be a significant factor in network disruptions, one that can easily be solved by having a proper cooling system in place, in order to keep your servers within the temperature range recommended by the ASHRAE thermal guidelines.
Data centre cooling methods
When it comes to putting an efficient cooling system in place for your data centre, there are a number of different options available to you.
Air cooling
Air cooling in the most common form of cooling used in data centres due to its budget-friendly nature. Using CRACs (computer room air conditioners), you have the option of cooling your entire data centre or focusing the cooling on a specific rack or even a single row. In recent years, their efficiency has been greatly improved by the implementation of hot and cold aisle designs, isolating the hot air from the cold air in the room.
“Free” cooling
As the name implies, free cooling is essentially cooling your data centre for, well, free. So, strictly speaking, free cooling isn’t entirely free but it does allow you to minimise the cooling costs for your data centre. This method – also called air-side economisation – works by using air from outside the building to cool your servers, rather than using chillers and compressors to do all of the work.
Hot air from the data centre is removed to the outside environment, while cool air from outdoors is simultaneously circulated in, cooling down the servers. Although free cooling still uses compressors, it does away with the energy needed to cool the hot air in the compressors themselves, which can often be the most energy consuming aspect of cooling a data centre.
Liquid cooling
Once reserved for mainframes and supercomputers, the use of liquid cooling in commercial data centres has seen a rise in recent years as more is demanded of them now than ever, and storage density continues to increase. This method of cooling uses piping near the racks to pump cold water or a refrigerant fluid through your data centre to draw out the heat. This is usually assisted by a fan to disperse the cool air coming from the piping.