Green Data Cabinets Feature Editorial

The data center at the University of California at Berkeley is seeing savings by using a wireless, sensor-based monitoring system from Arch Rock to follow thermal and power conditions - just as the center is poised to undertake a major energy efficiency upgrade.

Steve A. Aguirre, manager of the university's Data Center, said they are using the Arch Rock Energy Optimizer and PhyNet, which is a wireless sensor network platform. 

Energy Optimizer can measure both power and cooling system efficiency and correlate the two, enabling customers to baseline the data center against benchmarks, identify factors responsible for energy waste, and optimize available capacity for new servers based on actual electrical/cooling consumption.

The university was looking to expand the capacity of its campus data center, and at the same time make the data center more energy-efficient. The 10,000-square-foot facility, with about 200 equipment racks and more than 1,000 servers, is heavily devoted to scientific research computing but also supports the university's administrative and other systems. In late 2009 data center management was being asked to bring in another high-performance research cluster, involving about 10 additional server racks. This would mean a 20 percent increase in UPS, uninterruptible power supply, output, from 400 kilowatts to 500 kilowatts of power.

There was no way to know what the inlet temperatures on the server racks were, so lacking data on these conditions, the only safe alternative would be to add expensive new air conditioning capacity - something not provided for in the budget.

Aguirre estimates that, since the Energy Optimizer was installed, the data center is accommodating 20 percent more equipment with existing assets.

"We wouldn't have been able to put the same concentration of equipment in the same space without having this visibility into thermal and power conditions," he said.

'If I had had to do all of this with wired sensors, it would have cost a tremendous amount of money,' Aguirre added.

This year, the UC-Berkeley data center will undertake a major energy efficiency upgrade project, implementing full hot- and cold-aisle containment and controls. As the project progresses, Aguirre said, Energy Optimizer will 'measure its impact so we can make fine adjustments. We'll be able to make more use of the space we have - and know exactly where we can put new equipment."

A total of 30 sensor nodes are installed, providing more than 160 temperature, humidity and pressure measurements.

Nodes send their data to an Arch Rock PhyNet IP router, which in turn transmits the information to the Energy Portal, a web-based application that displays detailed energy and thermal usage data in graphs and tables.

The Energy Optimizer's server software and dashboard is available either as SaaS (News - Alert), Software as a Service, which is cloud-based, or as a server appliance that may be installed at the customer premise. The university is using SaaS.

In other company news, Arch Rock has added a new entry-level server, RSS-2000AT, for small-scale or short-term sensor deployments in commercial facilities and data centers.