February 09, 2010

Many of our customers use Microsoft Visio software for equipment layouts. To assist our customers, we provide complimentary Visio shapes of many of our more popular products. But there may be those of you who do not use Visio and would like to know more.

January 27, 2010

What if you could reduce the lighting requirements in your data center by 30%, what would this save you? Let’s suppose you have a data center space that is ~5500 sq ft with a total IT load of ~475kW. What would it mean to you to reduce your lighting load by 30% given that this is about 5% of the total power consumed within the space? But more importantly how can you do this without impacting IT personnel when they are working within the space? ...

January 07, 2010

What we offer and how it works to make your data center design better:

Grounding - CPI offers a wide variety of grounding and bonding equipment from pipe clamps withof from pipe clamps with ground conductors, pedestal clamps with ground conductors, antioxidant ...

September 03, 2009

Question: We are currently calculating PUE on a monthly basis and I am looking for ways to make the information more meaningful to others in IT. What type of metrics are you using to show how PUE effects the green effort?

Answer: Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is useful as a benchmark for making comparisons ...

August 04, 2009

I'm an application, systems management, and middleware admin if you will, so when it comes to an actual data center from the computer decking up, I have little experience, so with that, I was not sure of how to ask the question, but I was hoping for a list of document names I should expect from someone building a data center or if I built a data center. My client is very small and this is almost pro bono (small startup city).

July 29, 2009

How important is data center thermal management energy efficiency? How about cashing in a 50 percent reduction in cooling energy on a one megawatt data center for $1.9 million savings over the life of the data center?

July 08, 2009

Question: What are your recommendations on fan controls and the best points to use for driving a feedback loop?

I have been reading quite a bit about Chatsworth for the past five months, and now we have an opportunity to install the cabinets, which is very exciting to be perfectly honest, but I wanted to run something by you.

I was thinking about the controls to implement for this project, I know from reading when there is a raised floor, the strategy can be as simple as pressure transducers ...

June 11, 2009

Question: My data center is a limited floor space (1600 sq) and running at 18 kW per cabinet. The cooling experts are indicating that a load of 18 kW would require about 2700 CFM to cool the equipment. They also indicate that max let through on a "Tate" floor tile is 1300 CFM. In this scenario we designed a wider cold aisle to accommodate a (2:1 - 2.5:1) floor tiles to enclosure ratio to meet the CFM required by the equipment.

This scenario leads to the potential of high density exceeding traditional cooling capabilities whether using CPI's Vertical Exhaust Duct or not, if there is not the floor space for additional perf tiles then your equipment cold air demand can potentially exceed the let through ratio. If true, would there be a watt per square foot - line/threshold, based on traditional cooling, raised floor height etc ...

June 01, 2009

Question: What floor tile perforation pattern (percentage open) do you recommend in data centers using cabinets with Vertical Exhaust Ducts?

Answer: If your data center uses CPI cabinets with Vertical Exhaust Ducts (VED) such at the F-Series TeraFrame Cabinet or the T-Series SteelFrame Cabinet, it ultimately does not matter where the air comes from or how it gets into the data center. However, since we have not addressed this particular subject before, your question represents an opportunity to talk further on the subject.

We recommend using one style of perforated tile through-out the space. Varying tile styles creates a mind-set for micro-managing the tile deployment, which is completely unnecessary ...

April 14, 2009

We often receive questions from folks in the industry about our products and solutions. Bill Watts, CPI Sr. Data Center Architect, responds to one.

Question: Is there a need to "balance" the air volume with the chimney solution when racks utilize different kW? Can I use chimneys on some cabinets and allow other cabinets to function without chimneys?