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Virtual Facility Simulation Cuts Data Center Cooling Costs
20 May, 2010 By: Rob AldrichCisco Systems saves an estimated $120,000 per year by redesigning exhaust circulation using Future Facilities' 3D modeling technology.
Cisco Systems, an Internet networking company that employs close to 70,000 people, is taking steps to reduce its resource usage. The company is currently aiming for a 2012 carbon footprint that will be 25% smaller than it was in 2007. Given that almost 80 percent of Cisco's footprint is generated by labs and data centers, the solutions developed to support an in-house reduction will also have relevance to the company's customers in support of a green agenda.
Cisco has several teams focusing on external energy-efficient solutions development. The Data Center Advanced Services group helps users determine the capacity, density, and efficiency requirements of improvements to the data center architecture. This group utilizes a standard methodology focused on quantifying power and cooling usage; establishing an efficiency benchmark for the current data center power and cooling design; establishing operative efficiency benchmarks across compute, network, and storage systems; and designing and implementing more efficient data center architectures.
Setting a Green Example
We demonstrated this method on one of our own data centers, located in our San Jose campus. Our plan for this data center was to replace volume servers with blade servers, providing roughly 23 times the computing capacity in the same space. Blade servers, however, require much more power — typically 20 kilowatts per rack, compared with 5 kilowatts per rack for volume servers.
The data center has been in operation since 1999, with limited considerations for efficient operations. It occupies approximately 7,000 square feet and is filled with 3,202 units of IT equipment, drawing 770 kW. There is 1 MW of total power available and 820 kW of cooling capacity. The energy bill for the facility was originally $1.4 million per year, comprising $660,000 per year in cooling energy costs and $707,000 per year in IT equipment energy costs. Controlling temperature and airflow in such a facility is essential because tightly packed servers generate a great deal of heat, which can impair their reliability and durability.
A team led by Cisco DCSTG (Data Center Switching Technology Group) Engineering Manager Chris Noland employed two techniques to improve energy efficiency in the data center. This first was a commonly used set of best practices that included blanking panels (which fill unused positions in the server rack) and plastic curtains to prevent mixing of the cooled air supply and the warmed air exiting the servers. Noland's team noted two major limitations of this approach: Firstly, best practices offer no prediction of outcome, and Noland wanted a return on investment estimate in advance to justify the required expenditure. Secondly, best practices are designed to address room-level efficiency problems. In most data centers, efficiency problems are as likely to be caused by thermal incompatibilities between IT equipment and cabinets as they are by flawed room designs.
The second technique the team used was the Virtual Facility (VF) simulation-based approach. The VF, a detailed 3D model created with Future Facilities' 6SigmaDC software tools, can provide data to manage the resiliency and efficiency of a facility throughout its life cycle, from initial design to daily operation. The VF simulates the power usage and cooling behavior of the data center, including the thermal interactions among the room infrastructure, cooling system, cabinets, and individual units of IT equipment.
Building a 3D Model
Noland's team gathered all of the available information on the data center, including floor plans and asset inventory lists for the IT infrastructure, and entered it into 6SigmaDC. The software provides libraries that include the most commonly used data center infrastructure components and computing equipment. Users can simply drag relevant objects from a library into the VF. 
An example of a simple Virtual Facility (VF) created with Future Facilities' 6SigmaDC software.
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