Data center user groups

ASHRAE TC 9.9 to tackle data center infrastructure at winter meeting

Next week is the annual winter meeting for the American Society for Heating, Refrigerating and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), to be held in Chicago. The group’s Technical Committee 9.9 focuses on data centers and has become an industry leader on the subject of data center infrastructure and data center cooling. ASHRAE TC 9.9 and has written books on topics such as data center liquid cooling, facility vibrations, and data center thermal guidelines.

I’ll be on hand to report from the data center-focused sessions. The ASHRAE meeting is typically a great place to see what data center cooling experts are talking about, and they often publish technical papers here for the first time. This year industry leaders such as Roger Schmidt from IBM, Christian Belady from Microsoft and William Tschudi from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will be speaking at the meeting. Here’s some of what ASHRAE TC 9.9 will be presenting:

• “High Density Cooling Updates” will discuss particulate and gaseous contamination effects on computer reliability, data center air management metrics, and airside economizers.
• “Application of ASHRAE Standards and Guidelines to Improve the Sustainability of Data Centers” will include discussion on the 2008 ASHRAE thermal guidelines, including its impact on server vendors, architects, engineers and end users. There will also be talk on data center rating systems for improved energy efficiency.
• “Liquid Cooling Issues Update” will look at ongoing work to get liquid cooling closer to the heat source, and will include discussion of real-time data center energy efficiency at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
• “Innovations in Airflow Management within Rack Enclosures” will discuss cable management for equipment with side-to-side airflow, return air containment, hot- and cold-aisle isolation, and enhancing airflow efficiency with variable-speed drive (VSD) fans.

Jill Eckhaus’ opening address at AFCOM

ORLANDO — AFCOM CEO Jill Eckhaus opened the Data Center World show this morning with a quick speech before the keynote got underway. She said the show here in Orlando has more than 700 attendees and 125 exhibitors, and is the largest fall show the organization has run since it started about 25 years ago.

Eckhaus said that for data center managers, “learning how to do their jobs with little to no training was a huge task,” and that AFCOM exists to help them.

“Because IT and facilities managers have always been resilient, they did what it took to get the job done and do it right,” she added.

Eckhaus added that for the first time in her 17 years with AFCOM, she is seeing a change in the view of the data center. Before, the data center was segregated and often thought of a department separate from the rest of the business. But now, she said, from the executive level on down, “spending money on IT has become a necessity for success.”

Some tidbits from the keynote

Members of AFCOM’s Data Center Institute gave the keynote for the Data Center World conference here in Orlando, and here were some tidbits from the speech that I wasn’t able to include in the main story.

Sisyphus complex

Richard Sawyer of EYP Mission Critical Facilities and a board member on AFCOM’s Data Center Institute board, said that having to deal with a flat data center budget is like the “Sisyphus complex.” Sisyphus, he explained, is a Greek mythology figure who was punished by the gods by having to eternally push a boulder halfway up a hill, only to have it slip out of his hands and roll back to the bottom.

Sawyer’s point was that if data center staff continues to stretch its resources and still gets the job done but the budget remains flat or is cut, that flattens morale and gets employees back at the bottom of the hill, so to speak.

Sawyer didn’t make any analogies between the data center and the Oedipus and Electra complexes, thank goodness.

Lehman’s – data centers here today, on sale tomorrow

In her little anecdote on the economy, Maureen Versen from Siemens Building Technologies said that about six months ago, she was meeting with Lehman Brothers regarding the state of their data centers, including their new ones.

“Less than a month ago, Lehman’s was gone,” she said. In the meantime, Barclays sucked up those properties at a cheap rate, at least as far as data center lots are concerned. It begs the question about whether the current economy might lead to the same level of empty data center space that existed after the Internet economy problems at the start of the century.

“Corporate citizen”

Sam Somashekar from CA, also a board member for the Data Center Institute board, had a couple interesting slides at the end of his presentation talking about green data centers.

Stating that going green was an “important factor in today’s economic climate.”

One of his slides:

Model for the rest of the business to “Go Green”

Another:

Become a better “corporate citizen”!

The quote marks around “Go Green” and “corporate citizen” were the parts I found interesting. I inferred that Somashekar figured that data centers aren’t going to “go green” just to “go green,” unless the green refers to money. Ditto with “corporate citizen.” I could be reading too much into it, though.

AFCOM Data Center World: The hot sessions

Based on a pre-conference survey, here are some of the sessions generating the most interest for the Data Center World conference being held in Orlando next week, Oct 5-7:

• Inexpensive Techniques to a Greener Data Center (Monday at 10:10-11am; Tuesday at 4:30-5:30pm)

Vinnie Jain, Advanced Marketing Manager, Ortronics/Legrand

With the constantly increasing demand for higher density and higher speeds in data centers, data center managers are always looking for ways to save energy wherever they can to avoid the ever growing problem of power and cooling. This session reveals some inexpensive and effective best practices to improve airflow and thus reduce energy consumption while keeping the data center cool. Data center layout, heat simulation, energy efficiency, and cable management will be discussed. IT managers will learn efficient and cost-effective processes for saving power and creating room for the equipment needed to handle increasing demands on bandwidth. In today’s world, going green is essential to running an efficient data center. Attendees will leave this session with some inexpensive energy saving techniques that will lead them to a greener path.

• The New Role of the Data Center Manager (Monday at 9-10am; Tuesday at 4:30-5:30pm)

Paul Clark, Data Center Manager, The Ohio State University Medical Center
Ron Kibbe, Assistant Director-Customer Support Services, The Ohio State University Medical Center

The role of the data center manager has changed. Dramatic growth of open systems, virtualization, increased network complexity, and storage area networks require higher rack densities that must be balanced with rising energy costs demanding more efficient power and cooling strategies. The data center manager’s role now requires effective understanding of emerging IT technologies and how to fit them into less space, with less environmental impact. This session discusses and offers recommendations to overcome some of the business, technical, and political challenges that the new data center manager faces. Attendees will learn what the industry experts suggest, resources that are available, and the tools to make it all work.

• Data Center Trends and Best Practices Performance (Monday at 10:10-11am; Tuesday at 8-9am)

Mark Levin, Sr. Partner, Metrics Based Assessments LLC

Over the past five years, data centers have grown in both size and complexity, and performance has improved for unit cost and staff productivity. However, basic data center functions, such as disk management, and problem, change and asset management have not improved for most data centers. The gap between average and best practice performance for these areas continues to widen. This session will present a discussion of these trends (z/OS, Windows, UNIX and Linux), and describe what best practice data centers are doing to achieve outstanding performance, e.g., data center and server consolidation. Many of the best practices discussed during the session can be adopted by attendees. They will learn what data centers can do to outperform the average and achieve best practice, how to measure the characteristics of excellence, what attributes identify a best practice data center, how does a world-class data center organize to do its work, how performance is monitored in a world-class data center, and how do you target improvements to achieve best practice?

• Building the Next Generation Data Center Facility (Monday at 9-10am; Tuesday at 3:15-4:15pm)

John Savageau, Managing Director, CRG West

Data center designers and planners are stepping up to the challenges of building high powered, environmentally friendly, and cost-effective facility solutions to meet the needs of tenants deploying a variety of dense server, GRID, and high-availability applications and services. Data center managers face many issues, including how to acquire utility power, space and permits for additional emergency power generation equipment and cooling equipment without eliminating available space or creating an unreasonable environmental burden. This presentation will offer a systematic approach to data center acquisition, design, and construction strategies to meet the needs of the next-generation, high powered user.

For a full guide to all the sessions, visit the Data Center World site.