Optimizing Data Center Air Flow and Cooling with Upfront CFD

Rising Energy Costs and Need for Efficiency Drive Companies to Search for New Design Solutions

According to an EPA report¹ presented to Congress in 2007, national energy consumption by servers and data centers nearly doubled between 2000 and 2006 to an amount equivalent to the energy usage of 5.8 million average U.S. households. It is projected that the country is on track to double that number again by 2011, due to the increasing need for data centers to support our growing digital economy and lifestyle. Companies globally are hastily searching for ways to make their data centers more energy efficient in order to be more green, reduce the rising energy costs associated with running and cooling server equipment, and help minimize the significant burden on our current energy grid system.

Ensuring uniform flow distribution is key to avoiding equipment failure; wasted cooling capacity is seen on the right side of this data center. Modeling the interaction between sub- and above-floor airflow is critical for finding these zones.

Whether it is a large data center or small server room, the space needs to be designed to keep the electronic components cooled to a certain temperature to ensure proper functionality. Optimizing the temperature and air flow in the room can be a challenging issue whether building a new state of the art data center or retrofitting an existing room to add higher powered more densely packed server racks. As companies move to higher density architectures, the heat loads increase significantly requiring higher watts per square foot to operate the center. Many companies think the solution is to add or upgrade computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units to mitigate heat dissipation, but these units are intense resource drains that increase operational costs instead of reducing them.

Companies such as Orcutt Winslow and Edwards & Zuck have addressed these challenges with the help of upfront Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The two companies leveraged the capabilities and help of CFdesign upfront CFD software and the CFdesign Consulting Services Team to optimize the air flow and cooling of their data centers. CFdesign, a flow and thermal management simulation software tool, helps companies save significant time and cost by modeling the complete air flow and thermal dissipation of the data center or server room early in the design process.

Using upfront CFD, air circulation throughout the data center and thermal management of electronic components can be simulated to understand how to best direct and leverage cool air flow. Other tools in the industry mostly focus on above floor air circulation, but upfront CFD can go beyond that to model air flow both above and subfloor along with optimizing the CRAC units to provide a complete picture and identify ideal placement of perforated tiles throughout the room. Additionally, thermal specs from the server racks in the room can be incorporated to determine additional ways to maintain ideal temperatures in critical areas of the room.

The ability to simulate all aspects of flow and thermal dissipation within a single software environment helps companies to quickly identify the best way to optimize their data center design. As a result companies can significantly reduce overall energy waste, minimize the possibility of server failures, decrease lifetime equipment and facilities management costs, and drastically reduce cooling costs, which in the current economy is a necessary goal.

¹ “Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency.” Public Law 109-431; August 2, 2007 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ENERGY STAR Program.