EFFICIENCY UPGRADES & EQUIPMENT
Did you know that cooling accounts for as much as 60 to 70 percent of your data center's total power consumption?
With energy costs skyrocketing, maximizing the operating efficiency of your critical environment is more important now than ever to protecting the profitability of your operation.
At Blackmon Service Inc., we are the experts at retrofitting data centers and server rooms with advanced systems that ensure optimum efficiency, reliability, scalability and cost-effectiveness.
Aisle Containment
The temperature of the air returning to your cooling system has a significant impact on its efficiency and capacity. In fact, for every 10-degree increase in return air temperature, you can boost the total capacity of your cooling unit by 30 percent or more.
The best way to maximize return air temperature is through the implementation of an aisle containment solution. BSI can design and install both hot-aisle and cold-aisle containment systems that are customized for your specific application. By positioning server racks so that the front of each opposing row draws in cold air from the same aisle while hot air from the two rows on the opposite side is exhausted into a "hot" aisle, hot and cold airflow are kept completely separated, thereby raising the temperature of the air returning to the air conditioner. For added effectiveness, installing a return ceiling plenum to draw hot air back to the cooling unit minimizes the mixing of hot and cold air.
By implementing this hot-aisle/cold-aisle approach, BSI can help you achieve not only significant ongoing energy cost savings but also improved server reliability and the capacity to support higher server densities.
Intelligent Cooling Controls
The most efficient cooling system is one that matches needs to requirements. However, in most data centers, cooling units are sized for peak demand, which in practice occurs fairly infrequently.
However, today's new more intelligent cooling controls are capable of understanding, predicting and adjusting cooling capacity based on conditions within the data center. As the environment changes due to server utilization, equipment location changes and outside variables, the controller reacts accordingly.
These types of intelligent controls enable individual cooling units to work together as a team and support more precise control of airflow based on server inlet and return air temperatures.
Fan systems
The fans that move air and pressurize the raised floor account for a substantial amount of your data center's cooling system energy use.
While fixed-speed fans have traditionally been used in precision cooling units, new variable frequency drives offer significant advantages, as they enable fan speed to be adjusted based on operating conditions.
By adding variable frequency drives to the fan motor of your chilled-water precision cooling unit, the fan's speed and power draw can be reduced as load decreases, which can have a dramatic impact on fan energy consumption. A 20 percent reduction in fan speed provides almost 50 percent savings in fan power consumption.
Additionally, advances in cooling technologies now allow VSD retrofits to be implemented on some DX units as well.
To learn more about how BSI can help you upfit your existing data center with solutions like these that will reduce your current cooling system energy costs and generate recurring savings, please contact Brandon Locke (919) 645-0323 today for a comprehensive Data Center Efficiency Assessment.
