Power and Cooling Calculations

[Anonymous user]

Hi All,

I am looking for some advise regarding calculating the power and cooling requirements for a new data center. I am creating a technical spec for the engineering company who will be installing the new CRAC system. The data center will not be full on day one, however I need to ensure the cooling and power infrastructure is designed with the future in mind. Originally my approach was to take a worse case perspective of the design, and assume every rack in the data center was fully populated with servers, and based the power requirements on the max load / heat output of each server. This approach has produced extremely high results and is proving cost prohibitive.

My concern is that even though a server may have a 750w power supply in it, it is very unlikely that it will draw this much power, and if it does it won't do so for an extended period. In my research so far I have not found any "average" power consumption and heat output numbers.

What I would like to know is weather there is a standard practice around calculating the total load for a data center which instead of taking a worst case (every server is drawing max power and producing max heat) approach, it take more of a realistic real world approach.

Many thanks in advance,
Jonathan.

[upsguy_apc]

There is not a cookie cutter answer to this question. APC provides some white papers that may help answer your questions.

WP-37 Avoiding Costs From Oversizing Data Center and Network Room Infrastructure
WP-40 Cooling Audit for Identifying Potential Cooling Problems in Data Centers
WP-42 Ten Cooling Solutions to Support High-density Server Deployment
WP-43 Dynamic Power Variations in Data Centers and Network Rooms
WP-44 Improving Rack Cooling Performance Using Airflow Management Blanking Panels
WP-46 Cooling Strategies for Ultra-High Density Racks and Blade Servers
WP-019 Re-examining the Suitability of the Raised Floor for Data Center Applications
WP-49 Avoidable Mistakes that Compromise Cooling Performance in Data Centers and Network Rooms
WP-50 Cooling Solutions for Rack Equipment with Side-to-Side Airflow
WP-003 Calculating Total Power Requirements for Data Centers
WP-004 Essential Power System Requirements for Next Generation Data Centers
WP-25 Calculating Total Cooling Requirements for Data Centers

Only you can answer how you plan to use this data center. As you stated having the racks fully populated and running high loads is cost prohibitive, however maintaining a large footprint of a datacenter with low density server racks is also expensive. Very few CRAC systems can even support high density server applications due to lack of airflow. You should get a Engineer involved in making decisions on how to spec your data center as anyone willing to give you an answer on a website forum will be extremely inaccurate due to the thousands of variables.

[Anonymous user]

Thanks heaps. The first article was very helpful.

Cheers!

[BillP]

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[BillP · Accepted solution]

You are pretty awesome for providing specific information with the question. great!