Cooling is one of the most pressing concerns for data center managers currently, as the equipment required to cool a data center consumes power, and thus impacts on both operational (CAPEX) costs and (OPEX) efficiencies. Usually sites of this nature would have chillers in place to act as backup cooling for warm days.
For internet backbone providers and international data centre operators with cloud storage technology can now consider shifting computing workloads from data center to data centre, where this will result in “follow the moon” energy management strategies, whereby organisations take advantage of lower power and cooling costs by only using data centers at night time, rather than during the day.
When the weather get hots, they will effectively switch off equipment at the hot center and instead transfer computing workloads to other data centers, relying totally on fresh air cooling. But the free air cooling concept within a data center does have its design weakness. Most regional only data centre businesses would not be prepared to accept the inherent risks in this approach, as this becomes a N+1 resilience issue of available data centres that are within the various time zones following the moon. N+1 redundancy is a form of resilience that ensures system availability in the event of component failure. Components (N) have at least one independent backup component (+1).
