Data centre thermal risk expert
EkkoSense has launched EkkoAir - the world’s first IoT monitoring solution to track data centre cooling loads in real-time. EkkoAir, which can be simply fitted to any cooling unit in moments, wirelessly allows operators to monitor thermal instabilities right across the data centre, enabling them for the first time to balance thermal profiles so that only those cooling units that need to be working are actually active. By concentrating on actual cooling duty information, EkkoSense estimates that data centres can improve their overall energy performance by up to 30%.
Unlike traditional data centre cooling approaches that are still built around the nominal main plate ratings declared by cooling equipment manufacturers, the EkkoAir monitoring solution is unique in offering true real time cooling duty information. This helps data centre operators to:
- Reduce risk by identifying those faulty or non-performing cooling units that don’t get picked up under routine maintenance
- Optimise capacity by accurately identifying spare capacity based on actual cooling duty loads
- Improve overall data centre energy performance by up to 30% by focusing in on inefficient or redundant cooling units
“Building a cooling strategy based on plate ratings might have once seemed smart, but it’s an outmoded approach that has systematically led to both under-cooling or over-cooling, resulting in either unacceptable thermal risks or unnecessary energy consumption right across our industry,” commented EkkoSense’s Chief Technical Officer, Dr. Stu Redshaw. “Thanks to innovations in low-cost sensor technology, IOT, gaming technology and cloud, EkkoSense has now been able to bring a completely new level of thermal monitoring performance to market, providing data centre operators with the ability to not only visualise and understand their own data centre thermal instabilities, but also identify the individual cooling units that are causing the problems in the first place. By taking the guesswork out of data centre cooling, EkkoAir provides operators with the real time information they need to really start addressing the inefficiencies that currently make cooling their largest operational overhead.”
By capturing information that was previously unavailable, and by being able to track temperature differentials either at an individual unit or data centre level, operators can now track motions of heat across the floor – revealing new insights into the underlying physics of cooling data centres.
