Data centres are one of the most energy-intensive building types, consuming up to 50 times the energy per floor space compared to a typical commercial office building. With organisations embracing advanced technologies, data centres powering these technologies are under increasing pressure around the globe to increase capacities and improve efficiencies constantly.
Greater loads on data centre racks create higher pressure on power and environmental infrastructures. Faster, hotter chips, larger servers, cluster networks, storage, and rising densities are putting increasing demands on data centre infrastructure and designs.
Legrand specialists emphasise that as the use of information technology grows, data centre and server energy usage also increases. Although many efficiency strategies are successfully employed in data centres, including predictive analytics and data-driven machine learning, these critical facilities require improved levels of intelligence to provide a complete picture of data centre conditions at the rack, aisle and facility levels.
Advanced tools, such as intelligent environmental sensors, are designed to survey critical resources accurately and in real time, alerting operators to potential threats. Sensors provide important information, for example, if there is sufficient power, a harmful hotspot, wasteful overcooling, or an unauthorised user near an open cabinet. Monitoring tools are used to advise if there is evidence of harmful environmental hazards, and how new workloads could be affecting specific cabinets.
How monitoring tools and sensors enhance efficiencies at data centres
In the past, monitoring and management was done manually, which was time-consuming and often unreliable. Outdated sensors and systems had little interoperability with existing rack infrastructure, putting greater demand on management. Legrand SmartSensors have been developed to create an intelligent data centre infrastructure platform, enabling a proactive environment. These advanced sensors are designed to work with the existing infrastructure, and can be installed without having to halt operations. When looking at a data centre sensor instrumentation project, optimising the total cost of ownership is essential.
Legrand’s environmental sensors form part of a dependable intelligent solution in data centre operations, and can be deployed as plug-and-play options with intelligent rack PDUs, inline meters, branch circuit monitors and other rack management solutions, eliminating the need for a separate controller and underlying networking.
Legrand’s SmartSensor technology, which uses advanced metering components to provide more accurate and valuable data, automatically sends environmental data to DCIM software solutions, revealing real-time environment data and trends, along with other infrastructure metrics like power capacity and power quality.
To increase operational efficiency and maintain a higher service levels in data centres, it is important to monitor critical environmental variables like cooling conditions, temperature, humidity, power and rack conditions. Best monitoring practices have been developed to reduce downtime and improve efficiency in critical operating environments. Every watt of power consumed by IT equipment is turned into a watt of heat, and as computer loads fluctuate, so do temperatures. That is why real-time, accurate monitoring of cabinet temperatures is a top priority.
Maintaining proper humidity levels helps avoid electrostatic discharge (ESD) problems when humidity is low, and condensation problems when humidity is high. Aisle environmental control involves temperature, humidity, airflow and hot/cold aisle monitoring. Tracking the temperature ranges in aisles assists in identifying problems quickly to improve efficiency. Specialists also recommend the installation of sensors to protect equipment from excessive vibration and shock.
Airborne particles and dust deposits such as organic dust, concrete dust, ferrous metal particles and electrostatic dust are an invisible threat to data centres, server rooms and other areas where IT equipment is installed. Although not naturally harmful to IT equipment, these ultrafine particles can build up and interfere with a device’s normal functioning levels, leading to a short circuit. A dust/particle sensor monitors particle levels and indicates whether levels are above or below custom thresholds.
The installation of water/leak sensors on the outside walls of the server room and beneath a raised floor is recommended to detect water and coolant leaks. Sensors also play an important role as security systems by alerting security personnel of unauthorised access to a cabinet. Some systems are designed to activate a camera system that points to the exact rack that has been accessed, while proximity sensors capture when someone passes near a cabinet.
Selection of the correct sensors
Legrand specialists offer advice on which monitoring devices are best suited for each environment. Firstly, it is important to look for scalable solutions and to design a system that will easily accommodate changing requirements. A suitable sensor and environmental monitoring platform should integrate into the overall management platform, providing visibility and granular control. It is also important to select quality branded sensors that offer high metering accuracy, to ensure fewer false-positive alerts and efficient overall data centre management.
Legrand’s SmartSensors deliver an accuracy of ±0,2°C for temperature sensors and ±5°C for relative humidity. Users should also deploy sensors that are easy to install, upgrade and repair. For example, units with removable sensor heads or with dual RJ-45 connectors can be installed, serviced or replaced without having to rewire the rack, saving time and reducing maintenance costs. In some cases, users may need to cascade and increase their sensor package deployment. Legrand’s SmartSensors are able to cascade up to 32 sensor packages in a row, linked with standard Cat5/6 cables.
Specialists recommend environment sensors that are used in conjunction with a DCIM analytic solution. This allows the system to monitor temperature trends in real time, calculate potential savings, and generate reports to share with end users and management. These solutions help optimise the data centre’s ecosystem, to ensure it meets guidelines and setpoints to reduce operational costs and improve power usage effectiveness.
DCIM software helps to mitigate risks by allowing users to visualise the data collected, and enables easy monitoring of the entire data centre infrastructure from a single dashboard. It is important to note that there are situations where users do not need to integrate the smart environmental systems with DCIM, and in these cases sensors will continue to provide useful information.
Conclusion
In a recent Legrand project, a customer that had previously been reluctant to invest in data centre monitoring experienced power issues impacting several vital systems. After costly and stressful downtime, the facility has now been fitted with a complete sensor monitoring solution. Intelligent infrastructure is critical for preventing problems and offering remedies to meet challenges in data centres.
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