The meeting was not going well. An argument had broken out between the Chief Engineer of Edifices, the firm that had designed and built the flagship data center and the CFO of TheDifferenceEngines.com, which had commissioned the build.

‘You promised me a class-leading levels of energy efficiency; instead the data center is using thousands of dollars of extra power a month than expected. I need answers!’ shouted the CFO.

‘What we built was the very latest in technology, using air-cooling instead of chillers. Your financial predictions must be wrong’, responded the Edifices rep.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, let me step in here’, said Sherlock. ‘I think I may be able to solve this problem to both of your satisfaction’.

Watson looked down at the meeting room table and felt a sinking sensation in his stomach. A facility this complex, particularly as its cooling infrastructure responded to the external weather conditions, would be impossible to troubleshoot to the level of detail demanded. Everyone knew that once a data center was built its performance couldn’t be accurately forecast – there were just too many variables.

The Chief Engineer and the CFO decided to let Sherlock investigate and Watson reconciled himself to the thought of long workdays trudging around the facility, taking meter readings and typing the results into multiple spreadsheets. However, to his surprise, Sherlock spent only a few hours asking the building manager questions about the design of the infrastructure, along with a request for data from the Building Management System (BMS).

‘Aha!’ said Sherlock, after a day, ‘I think we have found the solution’. On his laptop screen was a graph showing how the building was forecast to perform compared to how it was actually performing, courtesy of the data from the BMS. It could clearly be seen that during the winter months, its performance was wildly diverging from that predicted, and the expected energy savings were not materializing. ‘It’s as if the air cooling is only working for some of the time’, mused Sherlock.

A subsequent interview with the data center manager uncovered the fact that he had not trusted the economizers to work automatically and had only switched them when they were staff in the facility to ‘make sure’ they worked correctly.

‘Another case solved’ said Sherlock with satisfaction as they left the building.

‘But I don’t understand’, said Watson ‘How did you manage to hunt down the problem so quickly and with so little work? I expected to be on-site for days.’

Sherlock gave one of his rare smiles and said, ‘The answer, my dear Watson, is that I used Romonet Portal to create a window on the inner workings of the data center. I like to think of it as my new magnifying glass, uncovering clues where the normal tools of observation wouldn’t help. And, as data centers grow ever more complex, it will become ever more useful in our future adventures’.

Your Data Center Decoded

Views: 44

Add a Comment

You need to be a member of The Data Center Professionals Network to add comments!

Join The Data Center Professionals Network

Connecting data center industry professionals worldwide. Free membership for eligible professionals.

Events

Follow Us

© 2024   Created by DCPNet Admin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service