Sunbird’s New Patent Will Change the Way You Manage Temperatures in the Data Center

As a Data Center Operator, you may often find yourself balancing the need to conserve energy and reduce costs with the need to ensure proper environmental conditions for the IT assets within.  But, relying on a room thermostat to monitor and set ambient temperature has been shown to be a massive waste of cooling resources, and ineffective at preventing hotspots. This has given rise to new data center environmental management technologies that some of the largest and most complex facilities have been using for years. 

Sunbird’s Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution uses an integrated approach that relies on hardware and software to provide a complete picture of data center temperature at the rack, aisle, and facility level, and help operators to determine the highest threshold temperatures can be set on without posing a risk to critical devices and services. 

It’s simple really.  While Sunbird’s intelligent PDUs distribute power to all of the devices in your rack, they also act as a platform that you can connect environmental sensors to. Those sensors then provide temperature and humidity (and even differential air pressure and airflow) readings to Sunbird’s vendor agnostic remote power monitoring software that can guide operators on how to set CRACs and CRAHs, and even alert them to hotspots that result from cooling system or containment failures.  Pretty cool, right?

But Wait, It Gets Better

On July 15, 2014, Sunbird was issued patent number 8782213:  System and method for the application of psychrometric charts to data centers.  With this patent and the unique technology within the Sunbird’s Power IQ DCIM Monitoring solution, Data Center Operators can now easily display an environmental envelope on a psychrometric chart.   This will allow users to compare the data from sensors to the environmental envelope of the psychrometric chart, ensure that adequate cooling is where it needs to be and that proper operating conditions have been maintained and they are in compliance with corporate, vendor or utility guidelines and requirements. 

In short, Sunbird’s Power IQ cooling charts will allow operators to:

• See hot spots at a  glance.
• Know when to increase/decrease temperature set points.
• Know how much to humidify.
• Easily manage to ASHRAE standard thermal envelopes.
• Simplify how you manage airside economization.
• Customize and add your own thermal envelopes.

To learn more about Sunbird’s DCIM monitoring solution and how it can help you better manage the cooling resources in your data center, take a test drive or schedule a demo with a DCIM expert.