Our cover story this month focuses on data center cooling and we have four great articles that address the topic. Lars Strong from Upsite discusses cooling capacity factor; Tom Boysen from Sellen Construction looks at evaporative cooling as a new way to cool data centers; Scott Alwine from Tate reports on a school in Florida that used variable air volume dampers and directional airflow panels to cool its data center; and Chad Beery from Peters, Tschantz & Associates, Inc., shares the story of how one design team increased data center UPS cooling without compromising the IT environment. In addition to cooling, Peter Panfil of Emerson Network Power discusses the energy efficient cloud and David Schirmacher from Digital Realty discusses DCIM. And, of course, we have our regular line up of talented columnists from the data center community.

Speaking of columnists, we are renaming one of our columns for the new year. During 2013, Paul Schlattman, of Environmental Systems Design, Inc. (ESD), wrote a six-part column on site selection titled, “Target: TCO.” With that series wrapped up, Paul will begin a new six-part series this month on data center development and acquisitions titled, “On Target: Development and Acquisitions,” starting on page 22.

Finally, I would like to thank the good folks at SunGard, especially Chad Coyhis, data center operations manager, for taking me on a tour of their facility in Aurora, CO, in early January. Sometimes, it easy to get caught up in the abstract; and it was nice to see how all the parts of a data center come together in concrete form.