by Angela Miller
I tend to assume that IT people (like me) have a fabulous sense of hyperbole. We toss around words like “disaster” and “outage” and “negative business impacts” effortlessly. And many IT Managers panic when we are less than say 97% perfect. We have a sense of the dramatic.

So I figure people might take umbrage with my characterization of my data center ‘blower problems.’ Perhaps you think I am again exaggerating. The picture on the left should correct this.

When I say blowers in my data center, I mean just that – a line of 6 vents resembling aircraft engines pointed different directions in the room. People who enter this room do so at their own risk, especially when the blowers are churning at full speed. Smaller people on the team probably should have carabiners and safety lines.

Since my arrival at NCTD, this device has been one of the more discussed items on the team. All kidding aside, this is not the right solution for a data center. Admitedly, we were in a crisis mode when this modification was made. And nothing against the people who chose to install these, because frankly we would be in far worse shape had they not done so. This installation bought us a year … maybe two.

In my mind, this is a good example of the dilemma facing many SMB entities in their data centers — how do we evolve to deal with our ever-increasing energy, cooling, and storage demands? How do we make upgrades to our facilities in a way that meets the burgeoning needs? And should sustainability be a consideration in our design choices.

One thing is certain – choosing the wrong solution is far from sustainable and misses our return on investment. In our case, we are now facing not only cooling problems since the air flow with this device does not address the hot spot problems in the room, but also humidity issues, and power issues since we’ve used almost all the rest of the power in the room on these air handling units. On the plus side, if I installed a wind turbine in the room I could probably dramatically improve my Power Utilization Effectiveness.

Over the next several weeks we’ll look at some of the options we’ll have to choose from in implementing a different approach to the cooling needs. Will we be able to choose a green option given our budget constraints? Stay tuned…