With data centers going green and the pressure to improve the thermal management and temperature monitoring of servers and mission-critical systems rising high, power management solutions providers are employing novel cooling technologies to cut infrastructure operating costs and save dollars. 

“CMS and CMI have helped Brocade (News - Alert) achieve its goal of creating a data center that represents excellence in consolidation, energy efficiency, sustainable design and technology innovation,” said Michael Hirahara, Vice President, Global Real Estate, Facilities and Services at Brocade. “They were able to provide a cost-effective, customizable in-row cooling solution that uses 75 percent less energy than other available designs.”

Toward that goal, custom cooling/HVAC solutions provider Custom Mechanical Systems, in partnership with a major mechanical contractor Critchfield Mechanical, has developed an innovative in-row cooling system that uses 75 percent less energy than other competing designs in the market. Employing temperature monitoring techniques, the new cooling solution was implemented in Brocade’s latest world-class data center.

According to the developers, the state-of-the-art in-row cooling system with water-side economizer minimizes fan usage and maximizes efficiency to save about half a megaWatt of energy at full build-out. Thus, CMS and CMI have jointly enabled Brocade to achieve its goal of creating a data center that represents excellence in scalability and flexibility, energy efficiency, and environmental sustainability, said CMS.

 “Working to build a custom solution as a team with Brocade and CMI, we delivered a superior product with higher efficiency at a low first cost,” said Dan Hyman, co-founder and principal at CMS. “We’re thrilled to be a part of one of the most energy-efficient data centers in the country, and that our custom cooling technology is helping to make that possible.”

Similarly, Jennifer Fraser, project manager for CMI and engineer of record on the Brocade project, stated, “Building a solution customized to the client’s design needs is rewarding. “The ability to alter and define a product, rather than be restricted by out of the box solutions was critical to the success of our team.”

Brocade’s data center is the largest in the world using in-row cooling, which, coupled with a highly efficient chilled water plant inclusive of a water-side economizer, provides a mechanical system with a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of less than 1.3. Data centers of this size typically have a PUE of greater than 1.5. To ensure a fully-customizable and flexible product, multiple iterations of the design were produced in order to meet Brocade’s exacting specifications. CMS also worked with the construction team to design features, such as variable speed ECM motors, fan redundancy, locking latches, temperature monitoring and low-profile hinged filter doors, that simplify maintenance and improve reliability.

“Gartner (News - Alert) has identified flexibility, agility and improved cost as three hallmarks of the next-generation data center, and our partnership with these two companies has helped us achieve our objectives in all three of these key requirements,” commented a Brocade official.

Thus, the Brocade data center exceeds California Energy Code requirements by 16 percent and qualifies Brocade for one of the largest utility incentive rebates in California’s history, claims CMS. With standardized management of cooling, power management and space management, the data center is designed to significantly reduce operating expenses and deliver long-term cost savings, said CMS.