30 Minute Interview

‘‘Data centers are oversized leading to wastage of energy and maintenance costs’’

Amod Ranade, Business Development Manager-Asia Pacific, APC MGE spoke to V Sudhakshina about the critical challenges faced by Indian data centers

Amod Ranade

Challenges faced by Indian data center managers

The business challenges faced by data center managers are no different from those faced by their global counterparts. The entire IT infrastructure including processes, applications, hardware, and software are going through a phase of innovation and change. Today’s business reality is to improve performance and efficiency of a data center with a limited budget. Indian customers are demanding higher performance along with resilience. Additionally they are worried about the escalating cost of power, cooling and real estate. They are looking at reducing their data center operation cost over the long term. The growing business expectations, changing IT environment, high cost of operations and maintenance, complying with regulations are a few of the concerns expressed by data center managers. Among these, power and cooling costs for the data center are a major concern area. Today’s data have less than 50% utilization. This drives excessive capital and maintenance expenses, which are a substantial fraction of the overall life cycle cost of a data center. There is a big gap between actual and planned consumption leading to wastage of system resources and associated costs. The unused infrastructure is a planned decision taken by data center managers keeping in mind IT operations in the future and meeting rising demand.

Efficient power and cooling

Energy efficiency and cooling management becomes a tedious job. Through research on various data centers, we found that the traditional way of cooling a room was ineffective for next generation data centers. In the traditional room cooling method, one or more air-conditioners work in parallel and it pushes cool air in and hot air out. The problem with this kind of architecture is that it ends up mixing air in a room for bringing homogenous average temperature and preventing hotspots from occurring. This kind of air mixing can be appropriate for data centers where the power consumption is on the lower side. IT power density has started reaching up to 20 kW per rack or more, with this high-density air mixing becomes ineffective.

We redesigned the power infrastructure to address energy issues. We also redesigned the air-conditioning system so that it integrates with rows of racks or with individual racks. This kind of design moves air at a lower velocity to provide horizontal cooling. The reduction of airflow leads to less utilization of fan power. This design allows racks with blade servers to run with a high density of power, while the other row can run with low-density power. There is no need for raised floors as you implement the air conditioner within the rack. The row-oriented design gives the benefit of installation, costs, energy efficiency, and manageability.

Addressing physical infrastructure management

Long-term data center or network room planning [for capacity] may seem an impossible task in view of the rapid evolution of IT technology and business requirements. APC surveyed users and found two solutions for solving these issues, i.e. standardization and modularity. We thought of having a standardized component that can work together in any configuration. We did a lot of research and came up with an architecture that will save on capital, energy, and the non-energy costs, as well continuously adapt to changing requirements. By our analysis, we developed a simplified model to describe the infrastructure capacity plan for a data center. We integrated all our product line of UPS, power distribution, rack power distribution, cooling products, management products, services, security, surveillance etc into one. We thought of planning our data center in by zones rather than using the conventional measure of sq. ft. We found that a row is a good equalizer, which provides representative information of a data center from the design perspective. These zones are one or more rows designed in such a way that they can describe the average density of each row. Each zone has its own UPS and cooling. If there are variations in data center design, then one can have homogenous rows that are non-homogenous in the data center. We also redesigned the UPS model to fit into zones. We deploy the cables and wiring required for particular racks above the rack itself. This leads to easier design, deployment, and management of zones.

APC Data Center University

A data center manager, or anybody who is involved in decision-making or infrastructure planning of data centers, needs training. The person concerned needs to understand the challenges and solutions. How do you ensure that you have appropriate cooling or what kind of facility that your data center needs? The changing nature of data centers‚ and the technology that affects them‚ makes it critical that employees remain up to date on current theory and best practices for issues around topics of power‚ cooling‚ management‚ security‚ and planning.

Data Center University (DCU) is an initiative taken by APC for providing knowledge to IT professionals and data center managers to help them design next generation data centers. At DCU, we try to condense the knowledge into 20-minute sessions. Courses are available at three levels, based upon the trainee’s level of experience. In an effort to provide the industry with standards for measuring competency in the core elements of a data center, we offer Associate level certification, the global standard for foundational knowledge in data center design, build and operations. Currently the courses are free for any customer and the certification will come at a price of $295.

We launched [DCU] it three years ago and got a good response. All our courses are in consultation with IEEE, we are planning to bring them as a compulsory qualification for data centers managers.