INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE POWERED BY THE DCA INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE POWERED BY THE DCA
Getting that little bit more out of your data centre
There are various ways to get the best out of your data centre . Zac Potts , Associate Director ( Data Centre Design ) – Sudlows , discusses what getting the best performance from a data centre means and why it is critical to invest in definition and design in order to lay strong foundations for reliable performance .
What does it mean to you to
be squeezing every drop of performance out of a data centre ? The answer will undoubtedly change depending on the angle you ’ re coming from , but should it ?
Designers of the cooling or power systems may read this as delivering the highest capacity or most efficient cooling or UPS System . IT teams will have different ideas of ‘ performance ’ depending on what they do : compute power , bandwidth , or storage capacity , perhaps .
Finance , of course , will likely look at the bottom line – a high-performance data centre is one that generates a lot of money , or costs very little to support a business which generates a lot of money .
Fundamentally , performance is about output , so it ’ s critical that we understand what performance means to the data centre in question . Unfortunately , there are very few data centres with a single function – Bitcoin-mining farms maybe – but the vast majority are inherently complex with numerous functions , the proportion and distribution of which may even change with time .
Getting the most out of any single facility can mean different things – is it more racks , more power , or higher density ? Is it high-performance compute , GPU arrays , or other specialised hardware ?
‘ High performance ’ can mean many things to different people .
Performance is different to efficiency but often the two become closely linked – make it more efficient and then use the spare capacity you ’ ve created to deliver more .
Whatever the intended meaning , there are two critical factors to delivering high performance ; definition and operation .
The definition stage outlines what is needed and within what limitations . Depending on the application , it could be simple or fairly complex , but to be able to squeeze every bit out of a facility or design , it is important to ensure the definition is sound , free from ambiguity or issues and applies the right constraints in the right places . It is not the supply air temperature to the data centre that ’ s important , for example , but the temperature of the equipment being www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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