Data center management is a balance between power, cooling and space.  Poor cooling practices can lead to unnecessary capital investments as well as limit the amount of computing resources supported in your data center.  Even small data centers can benefit from applying simple, best practices such as air segregation.

Poor air segregation practices can max out HVAC equipment at 50% of their plate rated capacity.

Using the space above and below the equipment to segregate air flow, data center managers can reduce the load on their HVAC equipment and lower costs.

Utilizing a hot and cold aisle configuration further reduces air mixing ensuring the return of higher temperature air to the HVAC air handlers and significantly extending economization hours.  Increasing economizer usage improves equipment reliability and in mild climates can provide compressor free cooling.

In addition to hot aisle/cold aisle configurations, a rack by rack evaluation should be performed.  Look for lightly loaded racks without blanking panels, floor tile leakage, and air flow obstructions which could represent wasted cooling and lost capacity.

With such high energy consumption and the ability to apply simple changes which offer significant saving opportunities, data centers should be a prime focus for efficient designs and usage improvements. Combined with an airside economizer, air management can reduce data center cooling costs by over 60%.

To find out how Metagyre has reduced costs for clients and improved operations contact us today.  More detailed information on data center efficiency is available from PG&E “High Performance Data Centers“.

Is a Boeing 747 three times “faster” than a Boeing 737?  They both cruise at around 500 miles per hour. The difference is that the 747 carries 500 passengers where as the 737 only carries 150. The Boeing 747 is three times bigger (more bandwidth) than the Boeing 737, not faster.  And like an airplane, as long as you have fewer files (passengers) than the network can carry at any one time, increasing the bandwidth will not reduce presentation times.

From a physical perspective, in order to increase the speed at which web pages or other data are presented to customers on the Internet you need to reduce the distance.  There are two strategies to reduce distance.  Regional data center (RDC) or content delivery network  (CDN) strategies both reduce the distance data travels to customers.

In this discussion we will look at the effects of an regional data center design architecture for reducing the time it takes data to reach customers. With an RDC strategy, you have multiple data centers (or collocation facilities) strategically placed around the globe to service those areas closest to the RDC.  For this analysis we simulated an RDC in Seattle, London and Hong Kong.

In order to expose the base Internet latency a test was run sending one packet of data over the Internet and measuring its round trip time.  This is referred to as a ping test.  As you can see the following chart shows latency increasing over distance from Seattle.

By moving the data and servers closer to the customer and establishing a regional presence, delivery times experienced by the total customer base becomes more consistent regardless of their location.  In order to simulate an regional data center presence the ping test was repeated with Asia Pacific locations measuring latency times to Hong Kong and European locations measuring latency to London.  The chart below shows the results of that regional data center simulated ping test.  The distances and the latency are from the initiating location to the simulated regional data center.  There was a 65% improvement in the average response time utilizing the regional data center model.

Conclusion:
While big network pipes will push more data out the data center door, it will not always deliver it to Internet customers faster.  In order to reduce latency, move your data and presentation services closer to your customers.  Depending on application solutions or systems, significant reduction in latency can be achieved through the strategic use of regional data centers.

The tests run for this analysis accurately assess latency with for simple data requests.  This investigation does not represent a specific customer experience and results will vary depending on variables such as time of day, network provider and other public network activity.