Air conditioning Close control
Racking up
solutions
Information technology is the fastest moving
equipment – and the fact that it tends to operate 24
hours a day, seven days a week – places enormous
of the sectors served by the air conditioning
pressure on close-control air conditioning suppliers
industry, and this places significant demands
to offer ever-higher cooling capacities, better reliability
and greater efficiencies.
on designers of close-control facilities such as
Unsurprisingly, Graeme Wigmore, technical manager
data centres. Ian Vallely reports
for air conditioning systems at Emerson Network Power,
believes suppliers have responded well to the challenge:
“We have provided a number of solutions, some based
A
s computing power continues to grow at an on conventional close control units and others based on
exponential rate, so too does the demand brand new technology, to enable high-density computer
for more sophisticated equipment to keep facilities to be kept at the correct temperatures in a very
the technology cool. Indeed, arguably, the energy efficient way.”
biggest constraint on the growth of computer power However, it is not only manufacturers that must
in business is not the technology itself; rather it is the grapple with increasing IT demands. Consultants also
cooling for cutting-edge IT developments such as blade face a real challenge – how to design cooling processes
servers.
For Wigmore,
that will guarantee the performance and reliability
Joe Wieckowski, general sales manager of Colman of mission-critical computers, while also balancing
Moducel, says: “Blade servers have emerged as the
the secret of
dramatic increases in cooling requirements with
biggest issue in close control, thanks to the phenomenal a successful energy efficiency.
growth in data centres.” According to research
design is to
For Wigmore, the secret of a successful design is
organisation IDC, blade server revenues increased by to take a holistic approach: “People tend only to talk
33 per cent to $5.4bn in 2008.
take a holistic
about getting the heat from the servers out of the
The increase in this sort of hi-tech, ‘mission-critical’ approach room. But it is important to go a step further and >
50 CIBSE Journal March 2009
www.cibsejournal.com
CIBSEmar09 pp50-53 control.indd 50 5/3/09 13:47:10
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