Reading The Room: How A Cool Approach Can Help Data Centers Be More Energy-Efficient

The rapid rise in data center demand has the industry poised to represent 9% of U.S. total electricity usage by 2030. With facilities set to be more overloaded than ever, it is critical to find ways to optimize data center energy usage while maximizing capacity.

BGIS, an integrated facility management services provider, has been in the data center industry for over 30 years and understands that energy management is an essential component of keeping these facilities operating efficiently. BGIS Associate Vice President of Data Center Engineering Services Roger Huggins recently commented on data center efficiency. 

“Data centers are often not loaded to 100% capacity,” he said. “Hyperscale data centers with homogenous equipment and applications can get close, but enterprise and colocation facilities often end up with a lower capacity utilization due to equipment variety, changing business needs and service-level agreement reservations that may not currently be used.” 

Huggins added that when a data center is loaded at a lower level, the cooling and other infrastructure equipment may still be operating at the 100% level, resulting in a lower data center efficiency and an increased power usage effectiveness, or PUE. 

BGIS, Huggins said, can look at the overall site operation and power usage today and adjust the cooling operation to match the actual need. The company can ensure that a facility’s cooling system is not only getting the job done, but getting it done as efficiently as possible with minimal waste. 

“When you lose efficiency, you're wasting energy, and when you're wasting energy, you're wasting dollars,” he said. 

Huggins indicated that cooling is not just a singular issue to be addressed. Rather, it is “a lot of small things together that make a significant difference,” he said.

One area on which BGIS focuses to optimize a facility is to look at airflow within data center white space, where IT equipment such as servers, network devices and power distribution systems are located. Huggins said it's important to ensure air goes where it is needed, particularly where there are gaps due to missing equipment. 

“Sometimes when equipment is decommissioned, the equipment is removed, and the site is left with a large hole in the rack where air can bypass or recirculate, reducing efficiency and potentially impacting adjacent equipment,” he said. “You need to be on top of it from an operational perspective to make sure that that hole gets filled and any floor tiles are appropriately adjusted. The key is to ensure the air management tasks get done to account for the missing or removed equipment.” 

Another strategy BGIS employs to boost data center efficiency is to examine the air temperatures in the space. Huggins explained that sometimes they will discover that a cooling unit is producing 55-degree air, which now may be considered over-cooling and inefficient. 

“If a system is discharging air at 55 degrees we'll look at why, and whether it really needs to be,” he said. “If it's coming out of the cooling unit at 55 degrees, but it's 75 degrees when it enters the IT equipment, then there's a lot of mixing and recirculation happening, which tells us we need to address airflow management to eliminate that mixing and make it more efficient. Conversely, if the air is entering the IT equipment at 55 degrees, there is opportunity to raise the set point.” 

He said that if he can successfully raise the set temperature point on a cooling system it will run all the more efficiently.  

Once BGIS is satisfied with the temperatures, the team can examine the airflow and adjust it as needed — by turning off excess units or changing fan or motor speeds — if the system is providing more air than a space requires. This can often be the case when equipment has been removed or replaced with different equipment, and the facility no longer has the same cooling needs, he said. 

Huggins stressed the importance of having an automated data center management system to monitor, analyze and respond to changes inside the white space. This allows for workload adjustments to help maintain optimal performance. 

 “Sometimes the change could be due to new IT equipment, a changing workload operation or even equipment failure,” he said. “Regardless of the change, there needs to be an automated system that ensures the IT equipment stays cool.” 

BGIS also monitors heat rejection, a process that removes excess heat generated by the IT equipment to help prevent systems from malfunctioning. This is usually done using air-cooling systems or water-based systems, Huggins said.

“If there are air-cooled condensers or an air-cooled condenser loop, we will make sure it's operating properly,” he said. “If there is a facility-chilled water system, the chilled water temperatures can be raised to allow the chiller to operate at a more efficient point.”

He added that it's crucial that operators have a way to seamlessly adjust temperatures up and down as required to meet IT needs. This is particularly important for enterprise data centers since they operate locally and their applications may not be able to move to a cloud due to regulatory requirements or other business needs.

“With enterprise data centers, they may have to operate some applications locally for security and compliance reasons, where owners have to maintain 100% control of the equipment or data more strictly than a cloud deployment will allow,” he said.

Huggins said he is excited to see how data centers evolve and continue to increase their energy efficiency. He’s seeing more hyperscale companies optimizing their operations using a single, customized application to reach a PUE ratio below 1.1, indicating a highly efficient data center that requires minimal power for cooling.

“They don't have a diversity of applications running, so they can tailor the data center for that application,” he said. “It’s great that they're able to do that, not everybody can, especially enterprise data centers, where there's a variety of applications and equipment.” 

Huggins expects that liquid-to-chip cooling will play a large role in the future of data centers — “If it’s not in your center already, it may well be soon,” he said. No matter what type of data center they operate, BGIS wants to work with owners and operators to help maximize their energy efficiency.

“Whether it’s liquid cooling or another method, we want to identify the most efficient and cost-effective solutions for our clients to optimize their operations,” Huggins said.

This article was produced in collaboration between BGIS and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

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