White Papers: APC

For years, the data centre industry has accepted that human operational error, not poor data centre design or engineering, is the number one cause of data centre downtime. Now is the time for companies to evaluate their data centre operations programs. They must be able to clearly articulate operational requirements and design an operations program based on the risk profile of the data centre. However, the road to creating an industry-best operations program will not be easy, especially for those companies whose core expertise is not in business critical facilities. Read on.

The benefits of determining data center infrastructure efficiency as part of an effective energy management plan are widely recognised. The standard metrics of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and its reciprocal Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency1 (DCIE) have emerged as recognised standards. This paper defines a standard approach to collecting data from data centers and showing how to use it to calculate PUE, with a focus on what to do with data that is confusing or incomplete.

Electrical power usage is not a typical design criterion for data centers, nor is it effectively managed as an expense. This is true despite the fact that the electrical power costs over the life of a data center may exceed the costs of the electrical power system including the UPS, and also may exceed the cost of the IT equipment. Read on.

This paper examines the reasons why hot-aisle containment emerges as the preferred best practice.

This paper introduces a simple approach, supported by webcast tools, for estimating the carbon foot print of a datacentre anywhere in the world. Read on.