Future Facilities has announced the integration between its Virtual Facility (a mathematically correct, 3-D data center model) and the new thermal sensors being embedded by Intel within its servers. This new development was revealed at the Intel Developer Forum 2012 in San Francisco this week, during a presentation involving Akhil Docca, Future Facilities’ product manager, and Jay Vincent, Intel senior technical architect.

Future Facilities CEO, Hassan Moezzi said, “Of the 40% of total power consumption dedicated to cooling in a typical non-optimized data center, up to a half is wasted. Future Facilities is therefore thrilled to be developing this solution together with an industry leader like Intel. Not only will this development make data center cooling more manageable, it will also reduce both the time and effort of deploying a predictive data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solution.”

By integrating embedded thermal sensors with their servers, Intel has eliminated the need for additional external sensors (e.g., sensors mounted on the front of the server cabinet). The embedded sensors provide real-time power, airflow and CPU-utilization data to enable effective CFD analysis and IT load capacity planning and optimization. The combination of sensors with CFD model also facilitates the design and operation of automated cooling control systems.

Historically, one of the greatest data center cooling challenges has been accommodating IT power densities and airflow requirements that were outside the specification of the original cooling design. By utilizing the Virtual Facility and its powerful CFD modeling capabilities together with data gathered from internal Intel sensors, data center managers are able to predict and mitigate problems caused by the IT roadmap before any changes are physically implemented in the IT load.