Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management, announced the launch of Data Center Operation: Cooling Optimize, an additional software module available within its Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) suite StruxureWare for Data Centers. This new capability adds intelligence to existing data center cooling systems, enabling significant energy reduction and cost of operations, as well as reduced risk of cooling incidents.

"Most data center cooling systems are specified to ensure that the hottest racks in the facility have a sufficient cold air supply. This results in a large amount of energy being wasted as the entire facility is over-cooled to provide this legacy design capacity, said Soeren Brogaard Jensen, Vice President, Enterprise Software and Managed Services, Schneider Electric. “For the managers of these data centers, it is impossible to consider how to reduce the amount of cooling without introducing risk of thermal shutdowns because they lack the information to do so safely."

Data Center Operation: Cooling Optimize enables data center managers to understand the complexity of airflow within their facilities, including all heat sources, cooling influences and dependencies. It is a closed-loop system, meaning that it learns from any actions such as inlet temperature adjustments, or equipment adds, moves and changes to the IT load, to keep the data center cooling continuously optimized.

Once deployed, Cooling Optimize enables operators to monitor the real-time status of data center health and determine the impact of any cooling event. This also enables situations such as overheating, hotspots and capacity issues to be predicted and avoided. By continuously analyzing use, future capacity requirements can be planned for, and stranded cooling capacity eliminated. Data Center Operation: Cooling Optimize automates a response to changes in the data center environment to reduce hot spots - where load requirement exceeds cooling, and wasted energy - where cooling exceeds what is actually needed.

In a recent case study, the system was retrofitted by a large Pacific Telco provider to automatically measure, analyze and control cooling output to match the requirement of a dynamic data center environment. Piloted in a single room, the user was able to turn off 13 CRAC units once installation and configuration was complete, saving 37% in average power use in the first year of operation. With the investment paid back, the customer is now rolling out Data Center Operation: Cooling Optimize throughout its data center campus.

Soeren Jensen said, "Through the combination of retrofit software which learns intelligently, and wireless sensors in data center racks, data center managers can quickly start to confidently operate their legacy facilities closer to ASHRAE inlet temperature guidelines, without risk to availability and without any investment in existing cooling systems. In use, they can anticipate up 40% reduction in cooling costs."

In 2014 Schneider Electric was positioned by Gartner, Inc. as a leader in the first Magic Quadrant for Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) Tools[i] for its StruxureWare™ for Data Centers software suite.  As a widely-recognized source for competitive comparisons in the information technology industry, Gartner Magic Quadrant reports offer in-depth analysis and visual summaries of the direction and maturity of markets and key vendors.

Schneider Electric’s end-to-end DCIM software suite enables data centers to monitor, operate, analyze and optimize power, cooling, security and energy. Data Center Operation: Cooling Optimize is available through Schneider Electric.