No Detail Is Too Insignficant Short blog today. While sitting a series of large-scale cutovers and work arounds for a client, we had a generator fail while one of 14 systems was in maintenance bypass. The facility is preapring for a retrofit, and we were installing some much needed repairs for the site to hold [Read more]

Presented at the 7×24 Exchange National Conference as a break out session in Palm Springs, California, in November 2008.

Why Is Everyone Picking on Electrical?The old joke used to be because we can and often do. Don’t get me wrong. This is not about the age-old argument about electrical vs. mechanical. It’s about looking at the entire building and its energy footprint in parcels, then summarizing them into a logical infrastructure. This is “tail [Read more]

EVERYWHERE you turn today, metrics leap out at you for energy efficiency. What the statistics don’t offer is a normalization of the data when comparing various facilities in various areas. Simply stated, a data center sucking in cold air off the North Atlantic or Baltic Sea and can cool the data center without some form [Read more]

Power Supplies – Friend or Foe?I thought a high efficiency power supply was going to fix my problems? Maybe. And you have a choice to make. As we have written elsewhere, carbon cap-and-trade will focus on total energy consumption, and we’re looking at all corners of the data center for gross energy cutting efforts. As [Read more]

Back from vacation and some key meetings, so back on the dais. Metering is one of the least appreciated platforms in the data center. Metering is rarely integrated across the building, nor is it properly applied to critical power system. So, how ar you ever going to get a realistic PUE when your ruler is [Read more]

Now That the Power’s Lower, What Do I Do?Part Three of Three As data center professionals employ techniques to save energy in the data center, the big hammer is the outright reduction of the power the process consumes. This is very different from raising the efficiency of the systems that serve that load. The changes [Read more]

Where Did My Efficiency Go? European Voltage and the Elimination of Magnetics Part Two of ThreeIn the last post, we pointed out that system loading, when above or below a relatively narrow band, can be actually quite poor. In this post, we’re dealing with the current design fad of delinving power to the IT system [Read more]

Where Did My Efficiency Go? Critical Power System Loading & Equipment OperationsPart One of Three Many data center owners and designers accept that the reduction of power consumption as a core goal for their facility designs and operations. What is routinely missed is that the component selection, critical power (CP) system loading, the electrical system [Read more]

In this day and age, everyone wants to become greener. Motivations vary: reduction of operating costs by reducing energy consumption, reduction of carbon footprint and the impact of pending carbon taxes on high-energy users, leave the planet in good shape for our kids, PR, whatever. Square foot – square foot, data centers consume more energy [Read more]