Opengate & AAFC, Winners of the Uptime Institute Prestigious Green Enterprise IT Award
May 17th, 2011Winners of the Uptime Institute Green Enterprise IT Award for Outstanding Facility Product - Opengate Data Systems and Agriculture and Argri-Food Canada (AAFC)
Lincoln, NE (May 17, 2011) - Opengate Data Systems, a data center solution provider specializing in the research and development of intelligent-distributed power and cooling along with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada win the prestigious Uptime Institute 2011 Green Enterprise IT Award for Outstanding Facilities Product in a User Deployment.
Uptime Institute Awards Ceremony - Opengate/AAFC/Prairie HVAC Team Photo
Accepting the award from left: Albert Steinbach (Prairie HVAC), Gail Eagen (AAFC), Joe Dorsey (Opengate), Mark Germagian (Opengate), Eric Swanson (AAFC), Paul Amsler (Prairie HVAC), John Berrick (Opengate)
Intelligent Containment - Beyond Hot and Cold
Just one year after winning the ASHRAE Technology Award, Opengate Data Systems wins the 2011 Green Enterprise IT Award in the Outstanding Facilities Product in a User Deployment Category. AAFC also a recipient of this award, presented their award-winning case study at the Uptime Symposium profiling a facilities product that allowed aggressive growth in an old data center while improving data center energy efficiency.
AAFC’s Winnipeg Data Center has been under aggressive IT load growth. Implemented 20 years ago with a six inch raised floor and the last cooling infrastructure upgrade done in 1999, the data center is currently operating well beyond its designed IT load.
The first major cooling challenge halting growth occurred in July of 2008. Recognizing that the data center was operating inefficiently with significant cooling over-supply, a search was initiated to find ways to reclaim this lost cooling capacity. Standard best practices in air-flow management were successful initially, but a year later AAFC was again limited from further growth.
A single Opengate “intelligent” active containment hood was introduced at this time and proved significant in not only allowing increased IT load, but also provided a number of additional benefits. Key benefits that enabled intelligent cooling decisions in this challenging environment were the ability to record and automate reactions to environmental metrics, and the threshold alerting capabilities of the system.
Thus began the “Intelligent Containment” project. This highly effective and easy approach has not only allowed IT load increases beyond what was previously possible, but did so without increasing cooling costs.
Knowledge Transferability
AAFC can apply the significance of a managed containment-cooled system, with load and environment metrics, to make intelligent cooling decisions in other data centers:
- Increase utilization of existing cooling infrastructure
- Deploy higher-density racks with confidence, success, and without confusion
- Valuable remote real-time monitoring of temperature and humidity across the data center
- Achieve high-density rack deployment with a traditional cooling infrastructure
- Achieve immediate benefits of rack deployment and reduction in data center energy consumption
- Achieve load increase and energy savings with a lower-than-desired raised floors
- Significant savings - Ideal for infrastructure and energy cost reductions
AAFC Winnipeg Data Center is Meeting Aggressive Growth Demands
The challenge for AAFC’s data center services was to grow approximately 40% with limited infrastructure investment. The Opengate Containment Cooling systems enabled AAFC to quickly meet aggressive growth demands on data center services that were previously not possible given the center’s cooling infrastructure. Opengate’s ability to actively manage rack airflow, with redundant fans and a secure Web server to email alerts and provided metrics, was significant in enabling intelligent cooling decisions. This in turn enabled higher power-density racks and increased cooling efficiencies throughout the data center. Prairie HVAC provided sales, installation and support services for the Opengate intelligent containment project. Upon installation of the first intelligent containment system at AAFC, the benefits were demonstrated and allowed the continued deployment of intelligent containment systems to further optimize the AAFC Winnipeg data center.
Opengate returns 100% of the hot server exhaust air directly back to perimeter cooling units or central air handlers
Containment Cooling systems take an innovative yet practical approach; contain the heat in the row and intelligently control it to simplify the entire cooling circuit. The Opengate system contains 100% of the heat right in the row of racks, eliminating the hot aisle. Eliminating the hot aisle is critical with temperatures easily exceeding 100 ºF (38 ºC) due to raised supply-air temperatures and more efficient, higher exhaust temperature servers. Opengate customers safely raise the data center cooling supply air temperature to the upper ASHRAE limit without any region in the data center being more than a few degrees greater than the supply air temperature.
Flexible architecture enables grouping of different rack types and quick placement of Containment Cooling systems as data center services grow
Opengate Containment Cooling systems require a much lower capital investment compared to other systems targeted for eliminating data center cooling waste. The return on investment is typically less than 6 months for new expansion, and less than 12 months for retrofit when using a row-based approach. The flexibility of the system allows sizing as needed for new spaces or for retrofitting existing spaces to reclaim wasted cooling capacity.
Zero-Pressure for Zero-Waste
Opengate systems control the row plenum (the area behind the servers where the heat is exhausted) to essentially zero-pressure. This ensures all server heat exhaust (and no room cooling) returns to where it is supposed to; the perimeter cooling or central air handling units. Continually maintaining zero-pressure ensures no pressure build up in the racks and allows intelligent data collection of the air volume being demanded by IT equipment.
Click Here to Download the Award Winning Case Study; Beyond Hot & Cold
Uptime Institute Link for; Award Details, Beyond Hot & Cold Presentation and Opengate Resources
Data Center Knowledge link: Scenes from the Uptime Institute Symposium
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Eric Swanson is the Data Center Manager at Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada in Winnipeg with over 20 years of progressive leadership experience within the Government of Canada. Eric’s current responsibilities include managing a rapidly growing national data center, with a personal focus on improving the center’s resiliency and energy efficiency. Eric holds degrees in Computer Science and Arts from the University of Manitoba, and a masters of Management Sciences degree from the University of Waterloo.
About Opengate Data Systems
Opengate provides solutions to maximize data center utilization and improve operational efficiency around today’s critical challenges - power and cooling for high density computing. Opengate solutions allow full data integration and automation; reducing complexity and significantly reducing equipment capital and operating costs. Achieve Unity Cooling® by delivering cooling to the data center based on real-time demand by the IT load. Opengate systems increase performance of the CRAC/AHU, improve chiller plant performance and maximize free cooling hours. Take an Intelligent Path and gain freedom to effectively and efficiently deploy high density racks anywhere.
Opengate Media Contact:
John Berrick | 866-934-9518 | John.Berrick@opengatedata.com