Schneider Electric has announced a free 90-day trial of the company’s StruxureWare Operations: EcoStream data center airflow application. The new software enables users to model the supply of cooled air using various cooling designs in order to evaluate their effectiveness prior to the installation of physical equipment.

“StruxureWare Operations: EcoStream enables data center designers and managers to reconstruct their computer room within the application, or import a layout from a dedicated design tool such as Schneider Electric InfraStruxure Designer. The resulting model can then be used to verify the effectiveness of proposed cooling solutions, data center layouts or inventory updates. In this way the risk of hotspots can be averted, as well as the side-effects of over-cooling the load which include poor data center efficiency and facility PUE,” said Soeren Brogaard Jensen, vice president of Enterprise Software at Schneider Electric.

The application comes with a preloaded demo solution to enable users to get started quickly. Other features of the software package include a 2D graphical floor plan of the configured data center layout including a Capture Index which provides a color-coded overview of tile airflow, Plenum Velocities and Plenum Pressure. The software also enables 3-D rendering of the temperature map, including airflow, temperature thresholds, and IT load.

When configuring the physical layout of the computer room or data center, the user can make a choice of which units, Metric or Imperial, are used to display measurements of room dimensions, temperature, pressure and air velocity. Adding and removing walls, cooling units, equipment cabinets, floor tiles and all the common features of any facility is made easy using drag and drop functionality and intuitive icons.

Once the room is configured, equipment cabinets and their contents can be added by dragging and dropping from an included Equipment Catalog. Once the layout of the room is created and populated, the user is ready to start modelling. Using different design assumptions, the benefits of various layout options can be assessed, e.g., the placement of cooling units and floor grilles can be optimised to the requirements of the load, and then verified using the software before any engineering tasks are commenced.

To sign up for the 90-day trial of StruxureWare Operations: EcoStream visit the EcoStream evaluation website, complete the form and enter the keycode 11080p.