Siemens and Vigilent have announced a reseller partnership in North America to jointly provide customers with a comprehensive thermal optimization solution that addresses data center cooling challenges across the facility’s white space (i.e., usable space allocated for IT equipment) and chilled water plant. The joint effort is aimed at helping data center facility and IT managers address the cooling challenges caused by shifting IT loads, uneven server densities, and changes in facility configuration.
By leveraging Siemens’ Demand Flow solution and Vigilent’s Dynamic Cooling Management System, users can significantly reduce energy consumption and improve power usage effectiveness. As a standalone application, Siemens’ Demand Flow solution optimizes chilled water plants, reducing their energy consumption by up to 50%. Vigilent’s Dynamic Cooling Management System matches cooling to IT load at every critical spot in the white space, significantly reducing the energy consumption of cooling units. This decreases demand on chilled water plants, allowing the Demand Flow solution to further reduce energy. The joint solution ensures optimal efficiency at part load operation.
“It’s really a 1+1=3 scenario. Increasing chilled water plant efficiency is one piece of the puzzle and improving cooling performance in the white space is the other,” explained Douglas Ryan, head of the North America Center of Competence, Data Centers, Siemens’ Building Technologies Division. “Optimizing both aspects leads to even greater savings than each solution individually. By combining our Demand Flow solution’s strengths with Vigilent’s technology, we provide end-to-end thermal optimization that delivers the next generation of data center cooling technology.”
Traditional cooling management techniques — including simple chiller controls and individually unit or networked controls provided with computer room cooling equipment — do not address a data center’s cooling complexities, resulting in increased risk, reduced efficiency, and wasted capacity. In contrast, the combined Siemens and Vigilent offering uses software to resolve complex problems and optimize facilities in real time.
“As much as 40% of data center cooling capacity is underutilized because IT organizations haven’t had all the tools they need to fully understand and optimize cooling systems,” explained Dave Hudson, Chief Executive Officer of Vigilent. “Changes in IT load and facility configuration make cooling extremely challenging to manage. Together with Siemens, we can meet this challenge while providing an attractive and easy-to-measure ROI to our customers.”
Vigilent delivers a Dynamic Cooling Management System that uses machine learning software, a wireless mesh network of sensors, and cooling unit controls to automatically match white space cooling to IT load in real time. The system delivers immediate and measurable improvements in thermal service level agreement attainment, energy use, and cooling capacity. Vigilent also delivers Prescriptive Analytics that inform management decision-making around reliability, efficiency, and capacity.
