Intelligent Cooling

Over the last few years we have been working towards restructuring our Data Centres with a view to making them more efficient. This has involved changes to the physical layout of the rooms and use of virtualisation technologies to reduce the required number of servers. The changes primarily involve more densely racking our equipment and coupled with disposal of tower machines has allows us to dramatically improve our space utilisation. One of the most useful benefits is the concentration of the production of heat into a smaller volume of air which is intended to be more efficiently cooled using "hot isle containment".

Containment isle technologies, in this case "hot isle containment" reduce the volume of hot air to be cooled making the process more efficient (containment is typically achieved using anything from perspex tunnelling to cheaper plastic curtaining techniques)

Implementation of such a strategy requires an upfront CAPEX spend, however the savings that could be achieved would be recuperated quickly. There are also many positive benefits that can be reaped from the strategy, the first is the reduction in carbon that our data centres would produce, leading to obvious cost savings. The second is the amount of free space would be increased, this space could easily be resold to departments, other Universities and with a bit more effort local businesses in Sheffield that are looking for affordable controlled environments to host services.

As the restructuring of the machine rooms is approaching its completion the next stage is to implement the hot isle containment which will hopefully be coupled with an air conditioning refresh to allow us to maximise our potential savings. Our second data centre could benefit to a lesser extent from similar use of air containment technology, but due to floor layouts is a less "natural fit" to isle containment technology.