Can blind spots be avoided when monitoring DCs?

A recent IDC report found that data center operators are currently facing three major challenges: reduced performance, downtime, and low bandwidth. Therefore, with the growing demand for data center services, it is more important than ever that operators can avoid blind spots that lead to business and reputational risk. So how can data center managers mitigate these risks? There are three major pitfalls in monitoring solutions to consider first.

1. It is impossible to trace everything

Sensors provide information about current conditions only where they are located, however, conditions can vary significantly and as a result, operators receive an incomplete and therefore inaccurate picture.

2. You cannot control stability

Monitoring systems provide information on current conditions, but cannot predict the consequences of failures. The only reliable way to monitor resilience without modeling is to deliberately induce a worst-case failure scenario, which is not possible.

3. You cannot monitor the future

Sensors have no knowledge of future conditions, and the use of historical information for forecasting is a huge risk.

Elimination of blind spots

How can operators overcome these limitations? The answer is to combine tools that have information about the past and present with a tool that will shed light on how the environment will behave in the future. This requires the use of CFD technology. Virtual simulation of the entire data center, based on CFD, allows operators to accurately calculate the environmental conditions of the facility. Virtual sensors, for example, ensure that simulated data reflects data from real sensors. Therefore, the results obtained can be used to investigate conditions anywhere and in great detail.

CFD also goes beyond temperature maps and includes modeling humidity and air velocity as well as pressure. For example, you can trace the movement of air flow from one location to another, which allows you to understand the cause of overheating problems. It is very important that this technology allows operators to simulate future sustainability. The CFD model provides information about any data center configuration, simulating changes in current configurations or in new, not yet deployed configurations.