Thursday, May 26, 2011

HotSpotr HT-310 Discontinued

Please note that the HotSpotr HT-310 3-speed fan tile will no longer be offered. Please feel free to download the new HotSpotr Product Line Specification Sheet at www.nerdata.com.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Winners of the Uptime Institute Green Enterprise IT Award for Outstanding Facility Product - Opengate Data Systems and Agriculture and Argri-Food Cana

May 17, 2011 – Opengate Data Systems, a data center solution provider specializing in the research and development of intelligent-distributed power and cooling along with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada wins the prestigious Uptime Institute 2011 Green Enterprise IT Award for Outstanding Facilities Product in a User Deployment.

Intelligent Containment – Beyond Hot and Cold

Just one year after winning the ASHRAE Technology Award, Opengate Data Systems Wins the 2011 Green Enterprise IT Award in the Outstanding Facilities Product in a User Deployment category. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) also a recipient of this award, presented their award-winning case study at the Uptime Symposium profiling a facilities product that improved data center energy efficiency.

AAFC’s Winnipeg Data Center has been under aggressive IT load growth. Implemented 20 years ago with a six inch raised floor and the last cooling infrastructure upgrade done in 1999, the data center is currently operating well beyond its designed IT load.

The first major cooling challenge halting growth occurred in July of 2008. Recognizing that the data center was operating inefficiently with significant cooling over-supply, a search was initiated to find ways to reclaim this lost cooling capacity. Standard best practices in air-flow management were successful initially, but a year later AAFC was again limited from further growth.

A single Opengate “intelligent” active containment hood was introduced at this time and proved significant in not only allowing increased IT load, but also provided a number of additional benefits. Key benefits that enabled intelligent cooling decisions in this challenging environment were the ability to record and automate reactions to environmental metrics, and the threshold alerting capabilities of the system.

Thus began the “Intelligent Containment” project, which to date has seen twelve racks retrofitted with six intelligent active hoods capturing the majority of hot aisle heat. This highly effective and easy approach has not only allowed IT load increases beyond what was previously possible, but did so without increasing cooling costs, enabling:
• fiscal and environmental leadership
• increased uptime
• higher density solutions
• the elimination of hot/cold aisles
• increased value of future free-cooling, and
• extended the life of an older data center

AAFC Winnipeg Data Center is Meeting Aggressive Growth Demands

The challenge for AAFC’s data center services was to grow approximately 40% with limited infrastructure investment. With Prairie HVAC’s assistance, the Opengate Containment Cooling systems enabled AAFC to quickly meet aggressive growth demands on data center services that were previously not possible given the center's cooling infrastructure. Opengate’s ability to actively manage rack airflow, with redundant fans and a secure Web server to email alerts and provided metrics, was significant in enabling intelligent cooling decisions. This in turn enabled higher power-density racks and increased cooling efficiencies throughout the data center. Prairie HVAC provided and implemented the Opengate intelligent containment. Upon installation of the first intelligent containment system at AAFC, the benefits were demonstrated and allowed the continued deployment of intelligent containment systems to further optimize the AAFC Winnipeg data center.

Knowledge Transferability

AAFC can apply the significance of a managed containment-cooled system, with load and environment metrics, to make intelligent cooling decisions in other data centers:
• Increase utilization of existing cooling infrastructure
• Deploy higher-density racks with confidence, success, and without confusion
• Valuable remote real-time monitoring of temperature and humidity across the data center
• Achieve high-density rack deployment with a traditional cooling infrastructure
• Achieve immediate benefits of rack deployment and reduction in data center energy consumption
• Achieve load increase and energy savings with a lower-than-desired raised floors
• Significant savings – Ideal for infrastructure and energy cost reductions

Opengate returns 100% of the hot server exhaust air directly back to perimeter cooling units or central air handlers

Containment Cooling systems take an innovative yet practical approach; contain the heat in the row and intelligently control it to simplify the entire cooling circuit. The Opengate system contains 100% of the heat right in the row of racks, eliminating the hot aisle. Eliminating the hot aisle is critical with temperatures easily exceeding 100 ºF (38 ºC) due to raised supply-air temperatures and more efficient, higher exhaust temperature servers. Opengate customers safely raise the data center cooling supply air temperature to the upper ASHRAE limit without any region in the data center being more than a few degrees greater than the supply air temperature.

Flexible architecture enables grouping of different rack types and quick placement of Containment Cooling systems as data center services grow

Opengate Containment Cooling systems require a much lower capital investment compared to other systems targeted for eliminating data center cooling waste. The return on investment is typically less than 6 months for new expansion, and less than 12 months for retrofit when using a row-based approach. The flexibility of the system allows sizing as needed for new spaces or for retrofitting existing spaces to reclaim wasted cooling capacity.

Zero-Pressure for Zero-Waste

Opengate systems control the row plenum (the area behind the servers where the heat is exhausted) to essentially zero-pressure. This ensures all server heat exhaust (and no room cooling) returns to where it is supposed to; the perimeter cooling or central air handling units. Continually maintaining zero-pressure ensures no pressure build up in the racks and allows intelligent data collection of the air volume being demanded by IT equipment.

Opengate Eliminates Data Center Hot Aisles and Provides Zero-Waste Cooling with Its New Row-Based Containment Cooling Solutions

May 11, 2011 – Opengate Data Systems, a data center solution provider specializing in the research and development of intelligent-distributed power and cooling today announced EC30R Row-Based Containment Cooling®. Opengate’s Containment Cooling recently won the Uptime Institute 2011 Green Enterprise IT Award for Outstanding Facilities Product in a User Deployment.

Multiple Studies Reveal

Data center cooling systems are delivering 2.6 times more air than IT equipment requires in an effort to maintain environmental conditions within the temperature range recommended by ASHRAE (American Society of Heating Refrigeration and Air-conditioning Engineers). In most cases cooling system supply air is 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below the ASHRAE recommended temperature. Best practices to reduce waste and attempts to passively contain air at today’s power densities have reached their limit. A 2010 ASHRAE study revealed that a typical 10 kW rack leaks 37% of the server exhaust heat out of the rack’s front rails and bottom where a majority of this air flows back into the left and right side intake vents of the servers. This study also showed that sealing the rack to prevent leakage results in leakage between servers and the pressure build-up in the rack causes a significant server fan power increase.

Opengate returns 100% of the hot server exhaust air directly back to perimeter cooling units or central air handlers
The EC30R Containment Cooling system takes an innovative yet practical approach; contain the heat in the row and intelligently control it to simplify the entire cooling circuit. The Opengate EC30R system contains 100% of the heat right in the row of racks, eliminating the hot aisle. Eliminating the hot aisle is critical with temperatures easily exceeding 100 ºF (38 ºC) due to raised supply-air temperatures and more efficient, higher exhaust temperature servers.

“The EC30R is an effective airflow management system. You only deliver cooling for what the IT equipment demands,” said Mark Germagian, CEO and founder of Opengate. “With deployment of our intelligent row-based containment solutions, customers are able to reduce data center fan power consumption by 700 watts per 1000 watts of IT load—a 70% reduction. If desired, Opengate customers can also safely raise the data center cooling supply air temperature to the upper ASHRAE limit without any region in the data center being more than a few degrees greater than the supply air temperature.”

Flexible architecture enables grouping of different rack types and quick placement of EC30R Containment Cooling systems as data center services grow

Opengate Containment Cooling systems require a much lower capital investment compared to other systems targeted for eliminating data center cooling waste. The return on investment is typically less than 6 months for new expansion, and less than 12 months for retrofit when using a row-based approach. One EC30R is capable of exhausting 2700 cubic feet per minute (CFM) of hot IT exhaust air from a group of racks. Multiple EC30Rs in the row work collectively to evacuate the heat, communicating to each other to intelligently monitor and control the heat removal operation.

“The flexibility of the EC30R system allows sizing as needed for new spaces or for retrofitting existing spaces to reclaim wasted cooling capacity,” said Mark Germagian. “The EC30R system is an expansion of the EC10 and EC20 Containment Cooling systems that have been shipping for over two years.”

Zero-Pressure for Zero-Waste
Opengate systems control the row plenum (the area behind the servers where the heat is exhausted) to essentially zero-pressure. This ensures all server heat exhaust (and no room cooling) returns to where it is supposed to; the perimeter cooling or central air handling units. Continually maintaining zero-pressure ensures no pressure build up in the racks and allows intelligent data collection of the air volume being demanded by IT equipment. Without intelligent real-time data collection, zero-waste would be impossible.

Opengate Row-Based Containment Cooling provides customers with the following data center cooling performance guarantee:

• Ability to deploy one cooling solution for all IT equipment types and densities (up to 30 kW per rack).
• Stabilize rack intake air temperatures to within a few degrees of the supply air temperature at all points in the data center.
• Reduce total data center fan power by 70% over typical industry standards - supplying only the volume of air needed by the IT equipment
• Dynamically adjust cooling supply based on IT demand as servers dynamically scale their airflow requirements.
• Eliminate backpressure on servers - allowing servers to operate at their lowest airflow rates and greatest efficiency.
• Flexibly scale containment requirements as needed - allowing full utilization of cooling resources at all times.

High-Touch, Quick-Deploy Application for EC30R with RowEnclosure™

High-touch data centers requiring pre-stacked and wired server racks can be rolled onto the data center floor and into the patent pending RowEnclosure, where facility cabling and EC30R Containment Cooling has been commissioned and is service ready. This allows facilities to prepare for high volume deployment of data center services while the server racks are being ordered and configured. If desired, racks placed in the RowEnclosure can be minimalist 4-post construction since they are plugging into a RowEnclosure which becomes the outer shell for the entire row of racks.