DegreeC Cools Down Data Centers

• By The WHIR, July 11, 2007

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DegreeC Cools Down Data CentersBy Justin Lee, theWHIR.com

July 11, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- As a growing energy crunch causes the cost of power to soar, data center operators are working hard to equip their facilities with the proper energy-efficient technologies.

The past several years have seen the emergence of different techniques for managing energy and efficiently cooling a data center, including solutions from such heavyweights as HP and IBM.

Some of the innovations in that space, however, are coming from smaller competitors. AdaptivCool, launched last year by data center cooling solutions provider Degree Controls (degreec.com), is such a solution. The "intelligent cooling system" uses a network of temperature sensors, under-floor fans and vented floor tiles to manage air cooling within a data center.

While most data centers have ample cooling capacity, their systems often fail to cool the proper areas of the facility. AdaptivCool corrects this issue by using temperature sensors to send information to a thermal controller, which calculates real-time cooling demand and dynamically controls the flow of air within the data center.

"It's a little like all-wheel drive for your car," says Eric Birch, executive vice president of DegreeC. "We're not creating any cold air at all; we work with whatever is already there. But just the way an all-wheel drive system puts the engine power only to those wheels that have traction, and doesn't waste it by just sitting on the ice, we take the available cold air and move it to where the hotspots actually are."

Birch says AdaptivCool can cut data center cooling costs by as much as 30 percent. At a cost of $5 to $10 per square foot, a data center operator could recuperate the cost of AdaptivCool in 12 months.

"Our solution is a good one, especially for retrofitting existing data centers," says Birch. "But we don't have the be-all and end-all. We don't have the holy grail; no one does."

DegreeC has had considerable success with AdaptivCool, having performed 25 installs. Birch says that most of its customers tend to be medium-sized data centers with raised floors that are experiencing power or cooling constraints.

One of the company's high-profile customers is managed hosting provider NaviSite (navisite.com), which, in addition to AdaptivCool, uses HotSpotr, DegreeC's new system for cooling data center hot spots in high-density server environments - for users who are not as focused on reducing energy consumption.

Solutions like AdaptivCool and HotSpotr are essential in helping combat the growing energy crisis, says Birch, who says that by 2012 more than 90 percent of the energy cost of running a data center will be solely devoted to keeping servers cool and operating.

"That's why we're going to need all these solutions. We're going to need HP solutions, IBM solutions, low level and low-tech and high-tech and virtualization - it's all going to be needed. We're just happy that we have something that fits in and can be productive and co-exist with most of the other solutions."

Tags:  data center operator  managed hosting  virtualization  Degree Controls  E Solutions  IBM  Intel  Navisite 

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