Have you read the news? John has (and still feeling edged out).

It’s hard not to miss the economic downturn and the many projections on how it’ll affect us in the upcoming months. Regardless whether it will boost or dampen IT spending, I've noticed that we’ve become cautiously optimistic and more than ever, becoming more critical on the solutions that promise to reduce operating costs and generate a faster ROI.  Maybe this kind of reaction is just a sign that companies have realized the mission-critical role data centers play in their business!

This also reminds me of a survey I read a few weeks back. Conducted by AFCOM, the survey suggests that investment in data center services will remain strong, as companies are either continuing to invest in data center services, maintaining their budgets or targeting their cuts in other areas.

Speaking of budget cuts, if there’s anything that needs sparing that would be cooling. This runs true in small businesses that rely on a building’s general air-conditioning system to cool their data centers and then are caught off guard when a hot spot in the middle of the room generates a server failure.

While comfort cooling’s small upfront cost remains attractive and may keep parts of a small data center cool, it often isn’t reaching the hot spots nearest the servers – the areas that really matter. Placing racks near air ducts is a temporary solution but is unrealistic as more servers and racks get added.

Servers, especially those running on blade technology, were designed for precise environmental conditions and are much tighter than people require. Hence, Bob Spengler, Liebert North America’s product manager, indicated the 4 cooling design keys to protect IT investments. These are all basic and can be easily applied in your infrastructure.

1. Install servers in a dedicated room with tightly controlled temperature and humidity - Insulate walls & ceiling if located within an area that may exceed your desired room conditions. Seal up the room by eliminating windows to reduce solar heat gains and by eliminating building A/C ducts
2. Use cooling equipment that can provide adequate sensible heat cooling capacity –Precision cooling equipment are targeted at cooling critical electronic equipment and are designed to remove sensible heat energy and seals room from dust and moisture.
3. Arrange servers and room airflow to aid cooling – keep racks in a hot aisle/cold aisle arrangement and down flow AC units at the ends of the hot aisle.



4. Allow for future expansions in business computing requirements and associated heat output – size your cooling equipment with variable capacity and as risk of financial consequences increases, plan redundancy in your cooling equipment.

My take on this is that cooling challenge in a small- or medium-sized data center must be handled ‘differently’. People give off sensible heat and moisture, while computers give off only sensible heat. Following these 4 cooling design keys can help protect small businesses’ IT investments.

Wow. I just said a whole bunch here, anyway ‘til next post!