White Papers: power and cooling

The consolidation of one or more data centres into an existing data centre is a common occurrence. This paper gives examples of what is becoming a standard architecture for preparing the physical infrastructure in the receiving data centre. This approach allows for shorter timelines and high efficiency while avoiding the commonly expected difficulties and complexities often experienced with consolidation projects.

Virtualisation brings the potential to deliver dramatic savings in terms of server count, footprint, power consumption and cooling requirements for data centers. For all its advantages though, virtualisation also brings some unique challenges. The power and cooling infrastructure—which may have been quite sufficient for pre-virtualization needs—could easily become inadequate when data center performance patterns are radically altered. The good news is that there are practical and affordable ways to address these challenges and improve data center efficiency in the process. This paper looks at some of the power-related challenges and the readily available technologies to address them.

Virtualisation in IT has brought many significant benefits and changed the way data centres are designed and operated. In a virtualised data centre, applications, services and databases run on fewer physical servers than before and the operator makes significant savings in power consumption, cooling and infrastructure expenditure.