In today’s expanding digitised society, we seldom hesitate to part with personal information. Whether registering to vote, opening a bank account, or purchasing goods online, we happily provide our details to one of the almost seventy data centres currently operating in South Africa. Some are housed locally in brick-and-mortar or concrete buildings, while others operate in the increasingly popular virtual environment known as the cloud.
In practice, the latter only appears virtual but consists of servers, software, and other infrastructure essential for data handling, but in remote locations in different countries and even under the sea. However, maintaining these centres and ensuring their data’s continued safety and integrity requires close management of critical operational parameters, including space management, environmental control, and energy usage. This article describes the importance of these three strategies in optimising the overall data management process.
Data Centres: Key Optimisation Strategies Explained
As the demand for reliable data storage facilities expands, the need to ensure these centres operate economically and at optimum efficiency has grown in parallel. The following strategic activities are crucial to meeting those ends:
- Optimising Energy Consumption: Minimising power usage can significantly reduce operating costs, and there are three ways to achieve this:
- Power distribution units (PDUs) can optimise voltage and reduce energy waste. A PDU provides operators greater insight into a centre’s energy needs when used with real-time monitoring tools, allowing them to adjust consumption as indicated.
- Multiple virtual servers can be run on a single physical server, significantly cutting power requirements for a data centre. In addition, server virtualisation reduces the overall need for costly hardware, consolidates workloads, and generates less heat.
- Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) enables a server to adjust its power usage based on workload. Thus, it can conserve energy during low-demand periods without affecting system performance by operating at a reduced frequency or voltage.
- Optimising Climate Control in Data Centres: Maintaining a sufficiently cool environment is crucial to ensuring a centre’s integrity. High temperatures can cause hardware malfunctions, reducing server lifespan and increasing the risk of data losses. Here are three popular ways to counter overheating at these crucial facilities:
- Liquid cooling systems use water or other fluids to absorb heat directly from server components, ensuring safe operating temperatures more effectively than air-based systems.
- Hot and cold aisle containment strategies separate the hot air produced by servers from the cold air used to cool them, reducing the load on air conditioners.
- Free cooling systems are popular in colder regions. They utilise external air or natural water sources as the coolant, significantly reducing operating costs compared to other cooling systems used in data centres. However, the traditional liquid cooling and hot and cold aisle systems offer lower Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratings, meaning they consume less energy than the IT equipment.
- Maximising Space Uatilisation in Data Centres: Optimal use of space will cut costs by limiting expansion needs and providing improved airflow for cooling systems. Here are three effective space-saving strategies:
- Vertical racking offers a means to house more servers while ensuring the smallest possible footprint. In addition to optimising space usage, the racks help lower the energy required for operating and cooling purposes.
- Modular designs ensure a scalable data centre, allowing the operator to add extra capacity only when needed rather than investing in a larger facility upfront. Modular systems can be pre-constructed to permit rapid deployment with minimal disruption.
- Cable management is often overlooked but can obstruct airflow, creating hotspots and the need for costly additional cooling. A structured cabling solution will avoid these problems.
CCI Technologies Optimises Data Centres
In addition to providing each of the services outlined above, we at CCI Technologies offer state-of-the-art power and networking solutions. Contact us for more information about optimising data management and meeting the ever-changing and growing business demands of the twenty-first century.
