As I write this it is early July, as we are about to move into the dog days of summer, anticipating the usual issues that seem to appear when cooling systems are pushed to their limits—and sometimes beyond. Of course, in the data center world failure is not an option is not just a phrase, it is a mandate, and if your site has a failure that causes an outage it may even make headlines, as has been the case of some high-profile sites.
I sit pondering different data centers and their various cooling system types, as they face maximum cooling requirements from ever-rising heat loads and higher densities, while operating under worst-case ambient conditions. Yet they all still need to provide good annualized energy efficiency under widely varying heat loads in the face of wide temperature and humidity ranges that they encounter over the entire year, not just the peaks of the summer.