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From careful planning to hot or cold aisle containment, there are definitely things you can do to improve the efficiency of your data center cooling.  Still, the technology we’ve got is always open for improvement, and Lawrence Berkeley Labs has just collaborated with Intel to develop and test another exciting step towards cooling efficiency.

This new technology works on the premise that your servers should be able to communicate with your building management system about their cooling needs.  Instead of just keeping track of temperatures of air as it returns to the computer room air handler, sensors are used in different places throughout the data center.  Getting the servers to communicate with the building management system is a fairly simple affair of using a conversion between protocols.  To avoid the common problem of hot spots at the top of server racks, this process uses temperature readings from the top and bottom of racks.

Intel and LBL used computational fluid dynamics to model their ideas and then proceeded to test them successfully in Santa Clara.  Now the issue is getting professionals to catch on and feel more comfortable with letting automated processes control something so crucial as data center temperature, as explained by the article at Data Center Knowledge.

-Elizabeth English