renewable energy systems that provide
power to non-critical systems such as
lighting.
Wind speed and direction can also
be combined with other factors such as
pollen count. Free air-cooling in areas
close to high pollen crops such as oil
seed rape has to be carefully monitored
to prevent excess pollen and insect
build up on the screens that protect
the fans. It can also help when the data
centre is located near to the coast, as an
onshore wind will increase the risk of
salt water increasing the corrosion of
equipment. This is information that can
be used by maintenance teams to decide
when systems will need preventative
maintenance.
Temperature from outside weather
stations is also important in free
air-cooling, as it will determine the
temperature differential between
the exhaust and input air. Humidity
sensors will also provide data on dew
point and whether other systems will
be required to remove/add humidity to
the input air.
Analytics The Key
There are at least four distinct
systems we’ve identified - DCIM,
traditional management tools, software
management tools and external sensor
data. Each of these systems can provide
large amounts of data in real-time and
the amount of data created in a midsized data centre, depending on the
granularity of data, can be in the order
of gigabytes of data per day.
There are various ways to use the
data. The most efficient way is to us a
transactional database that captures
the data using a common timeline as a
reference code. That allows the data to
be extracted and visualised to answer
a number of key questions. Those
questions may be operational or they
may be financial.
One example of the operational
data might be to look at wh