Cooling Systems, Power Loads & Redundancy: The Tech Behind Data Centres
Cooling Systems in Data Centres
Data centre cooling systems refer to infrastructure that helps remove excessive heat from servers and other IT equipment. This thermal management is important for equipment reliability, energy efficiency, and preventing data loss. Here's an overview of the different cooling systems you'll come across during your data centre jobs:
Air Cooling Systems
An air-cooling system uses air as the primary medium to remove the excessive heat of IT equipment. Typically, it uses air tubes, and the racks are separated by hot and cold corridors.
So, the air enters from the cold corridor and passes through the front of the data centre equipment. It then absorbs heat generated by the components and passes it through the back into the hot corridors.
From there, the air is expelled or passed through cooling units for chilling. Server-level and rack-level air cooling are among the types of air-cooling systems in data centres.
Liquid Cooling Systems
A liquid cooling system, as the name implies, use liquids like water and dielectric fluids to remove heat produced by data centre equipment. It's better at transferring heat and supports maximum equipment.
Some approaches that are helpful in this regard are direct-to-chip liquid cooling or immersion cooling.
The best part is that it requires less energy than air cooling and saves money. That's why more and more data centres are employing it, and the global liquid cooling systems market size is set to reach USD 13 billion by 2034.
Power loads manage everything – how?
Power load systems in data centres provide and manage electrical power for the reliable operation of IT equipment. They handle everything from receiving power from the grid to delivering it to servers and protecting against outages.
Some essential components of a power load system include a utility grid, transformer, switchgear, backup generators, and UPS. The following are the key metrics you may track on your data centre jobs:
- Data Centre Infrastructure Efficiency (DCIE): Ratio of energy consumed by the IT equipment in the data centre to the centre’s total energy consumption.
- Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE): Compares the total power the data centre uses with the total power supplied to the facility.
- Power Density: Total power supplied to a rack or other dedicated data centre area and measured in kilowatts.
- Carbon Usage Effectiveness: Measures the carbon released per hour after every kilowatt of energy a data centre uses.
Why redundancy is a must have
Redundancy is a must-have in data centres to avoid interruptions in daily tasks. At its core, it's duplicating or replicating critical data centre equipment and components to avoid downtime. It's very important, as 43% of data centre outages are actually power-related. Here are the different data centre redundancy levels one can explore:
- N+1: One redundant component is available to support the primary one in the setup. You may add a single UPS or HVAC to the N-architecture (the number of components needed to run the data centre at full capacity).
- N+2: Other than the resources needed to run the data centre efficiently, two backup systems are available that significantly enhance the end users' trust in the systems.
Handling all these systems, whether cooling systems or power loads, requires experts, which maximises data centre jobs and network technician jobs.
Are you ready to make an impact on the Data Centre Industry?
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