Data Center Cooling Innovators Recognized by IDC
According to a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy along with researchers from Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Carnegie Mellon University, U.S. data centers consumed about 70 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2014. This represents about 2 percent of the country's total energy consumption. And a lot of this energy is used for data center cooling as the hundreds of thousands of servers hum day and night in facilities across the country. So creating a more efficient and innovative cooling solution would go a long way in lowering the amount of energy these data centers consume.
The 2016 IDC Innovators report just recognized three vendors in the data center facility industry that address data center cooling and environment management of centers. In the report, IDC focused on companies under $100 million within the smarter data center infrastructure market, and it chose OptiCool, Romonet, and Vigilent. The report profiles companies with groundbreaking new business models and/or an innovative technology to an existing issue.
“Running an agile IT environment requires an equally agile physical facility that is prepared to accommodate demanding and fluctuating IT loads
. Technologies that improve the ability to manage the physical environment are essential, especially as datacenter resources become more distributed to support digital transformation and IoT initiatives,” said Jennifer Cooke, research director, Datacenter Trends & Strategies at IDC.
OptiCool has developed a data center cooling system that provides close-coupled cooling at the heat source for low- to high-density cooling applications. The low-pressure, refrigerant-based system can be adapted to any computing equipment rack. The innovation of this design is in delivering a very easy to use technology with a powerful performance and energy efficiency.
Romonet is improving data center operations by being able to predict and maintain peak performance in facilities with constant monitoring. The company uses its patented algorithms to gather, cleanse, and validate the information to provide a more accurate way of reporting the data and providing valuable insights to key decision-makers. This has allowed the company to accurately predict performance under a wide range of conditions to determine equipment failure, maximize capacity and lower energy consumption and maintenance costs.
Vigilent has pioneered the use of Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning and prescriptive analytics in order to deliver cooling management and mission-critical environments that is highly dynamic. According to the company, it is able to reduce operating costs and increase reliability in hundreds of data centers and telecom facilities around the world by unlocking stranded capacity.
Although data centers still use a lot of energy, the same study by the DoE and the universities also revealed the rate of energy consumption has gone down. This has been attributed to the technologies companies such as OptiCool, Romonet, and Vigilent have been developing.
Edited by Alicia Young
