When a data center faces cooling issues, performance issues happen too, such as hardware failure or spontaneous rebooting. Although keeping the data center cool is essential in order to keep everything in place with an outstanding performance, it isn’t an easy task because processors have a lot of heat energy and they are constantly pumping it out in a small space.
But it is, in fact, an expensive task because it is the biggest waste of energy in data centers, even beyond feeding the machine's powers. It is so expensive; companies are constantly looking for new and extreme methods to reduce costs, like placing data centers in unbelievable places such as boats or in really cold places like Facebook’s one located in Lulea, northern Sweden.
But if you are not Facebook and cannot locate your data center in a boat, here are some cooling methods you can implement in order to keep your servers running properly.
It is a design for server racks which the main goal is to manage airflow in order to conserve energy and reduce cooling costs. It consists of lining up server racks in alternate rows with cold air intakes and hot air exhaust facing specific directions.
It is normally accomplished by placing cold air intakes near air conditioners and settling hot air exhausts to go into an isolated aisle. This way cool air refrigerates the components and hot air is kept away from them.
Reducing the amount of space that needs to be cooled makes it easier to set up easier cooling solutions. You need to check your infrastructure needs and define how many servers you need to keep your data center working. An easy solution might be to use cloud solutions to remove the load from your facilities.
If your ventilation is not powerful enough or your filters don’t work well, you may be in big trouble, but it has an easy solution: you can use plastic curtains to separate your servers, which will help you localize your heat areas in the server rooms.
You need to check if the servers’ cooling fans are working properly and upgrade them if needed. Another suggestion is liquid cooling, which consists of using, well... liquid, instead of water to control heat and it is done by filling copper heat pipes with liquid coolant.
Check if the equipment you hold in the data center is really necessary. Do an inventory of all your equipment to see what it is used for and if it is working properly. This will help you throw away the ones that don’t work and upgrade others.
Do you know any other cooling ideas? We would love to know.
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