The Data Center Frontier Executive Roundtable features insights from industry executives with lengthy experience in the data center industry. Here’s a look at the insights from Jack Pouchet of Emerson Network Power.
JACK POUCHET, Emerson Network Power
Jack Pouchet is vice president Market Development at Emerson Network Power. Over the past 20 years, he has worked closely with major server manufacturers, large data center users, and leading mission-critical engineering firms to help define, architect and create opportunities for advanced power and cooling technologies that improve day-to-day operational efficiencies. Pouchet serves as a guest columnist for Environmental Leader, and has had articles in numerous trade journals, including ASHRAE, AFCOM, Mission Critical, Electrical Contractor, EE Times and Data Center Journal. He is also a frequent presenter at IT events and has played a key role in the development of Energy Logic 2.0, a vendor-neutral approach to reducing data center energy use. He is also a member of Green Grid.
Here’s the full text of Jack Pouchet’s insights from our Executive Roundtable:
Data Center Frontier: Over the past year, some of the industry’s largest companies have developed new designs for their data centers. In a number of cases, these redesigns have featured changes in cooling systems. What do you see as the important trends driving how data center operators are approaching cooling?
Jack Pouchet: We see two divergent trends in data center cooling, depending on the need for scalability, and the cost and availability of resources. In the first, hyperscale data center operators and a select group of others are moving to evaporative cooling – either direct or indirect — to use outside air to reduce cooling costs. This has the potential to consume a large amount of water, which is a growing problem in some areas. However, new economizer modes of operation, high-efficiency evaporative media, and sophisticated control systems are working together to optimize the performance at the building and campus level to minimize water consumption.
The net effect is that evaporative cooling systems in certain microclimates are achieving annualized WUE (Water Utilization Effectiveness) ratios of 0.2 liters/kW or better. For medium and small-scale deployments, very innovative multi-mode chiller plants can create chilled water with efficiency unheard of just a few years ago. Alternately, where there is a desire to use renewable energy or where water is scarce, the thermal management solution of choice has become Direct Expansion cooling (DX) with integrated economization.
Data Center Frontier: Edge computing and the Internet of Things are currently two of the hottest topics in the data center industry. How might these trends impact how we build and deploy data center capacity?
Jack Pouchet: As edge and IoT applications grow, the long-term result will be an increase in the quantity and size of hyperscale data centers serving cloud and collocation applications. We will also see a corresponding increase in the number and size of networks, whether fiber for long-haul or wireless for nearby exchanges. Those developments will only occur after the edge and local exchange networks and data centers are built out.
We are already seeing the market ask for the half-rack self-contained data centers to support the edge. Pre-configured solution sales are exploding, with businesses specifying micro data centers from single rack to a complete self-contained aisle. These solutions can provide a complete infrastructure, with access control, out-of-band communications capable of monitoring workloads, utilization rates and capacity, push software / firmware updates, and security monitoring.
Data Center Frontier: The cloud computing sector appears to be entering a phase of more concentrated growth. How do you see the cloud evolving as a business, and how might this impact data center service providers and vendors?
Jack Pouchet: On the public side, we expect to see more, relatively smaller (2MW to 10MW) facilities being deployed to meet demand from users who want to know their IT assets are reasonably close by, even when they are in a pure cloud model. The on-premise private cloud model is also attracting interest as enterprise clients are finding new value in upgrading their legacy data centers for improved efficiency while embracing the benefits of cloud computing across multiple lines of business.
We have been able to demonstrate tremendous organizational value in “refreshing” a legacy Tier IV data center to bring the PUE down to the 1.3 to 1.4 range, while retaining all of the operational knowledge and expertise associated with the infrastructure systems. These types of facility upgrades bring new life to the building and organization, while establishing a truly robust, resilient, and high-availability cloud environment, fully contained within the confines of the business security and IP protection eco-systems.
Data Center Frontier: Recent cloud growth has increased the focus on “speed to market” – the ability to deploy data center capacity rapidly and efficiently. How would you evaluate the industry’s progress on provisioning timelines, and where do you see opportunities to improve it?
Jack Pouchet: The industry has made tremendous strides in reducing the time to “go live” within a new data center, whether a greenfield new build or a brownfield retrofit. Containerized, modular, and prefabricated approaches have delivered complete data centers in the 90 to 270 day range, depending upon complexity, size, location and other variables.
At the large building level, the advent of fully integrated power and thermal management systems with UPS, switchgear, batteries, and power system controls, factory-assembled, tested, and mounted on a skid/platform are a giant leap forward in speed to deploy, test, and commission. Further factory built integrated systems, whether power or thermal management have sufficient real-world field data demonstrating improved quality, reliability, and life-cycle performance over the traditional approach using multiple trades, subcontractors, and on-site fabrication techniques.
Finally the prefabricated and modular approaches to building out medium to large-scale data centers are here to stay. They have shown their value proposition in both speed to deploy and quality of construction along with ease of operation. Numerous techniques are available in this space as one type does not fit all. Do your research, and you will find the life-cycle savings will justify the time invested.