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 ColdJust 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 DemandsThe 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 TransferabilityAAFC 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 handlersContainment 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 growOpengate 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-WasteOpengate 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.
“The Aurora is the perfect self-policing, real-time troubleshooting tool to clearly identify potential cooling or heat-related issues” said NER’s Vice President, Robert Huttemann. “Data Centers are dynamic environments, so the instantaneous feedback is invaluable when monitoring changes or validating best-practice improvements.” 
