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CHAPTER

Cooling

n the last chapter, we talked about some strategies to reduce how much power your
datacenter consumes. With any amount of power comes heat, and if there’s too much
Iheat in the datacenter, you can expect trouble.
There’s a fine line to be walked when it comes to cooling your datacenter. You want to
keep things cool, but you don’t want to walk in and see polar bears curled up on the floor
shivering. While many of us have experienced the joys of managing an undercooled data
center, overcooling your datacenter is a very common problem too. Datacenter managers
don’t want their equipment to overheat, but they’re throwing money out the window when
they use too much cooling power.
This chapter examines cooling issues in the datacenter as well as where you can save
money, and it provides some tips for adding cooling capacity without spending more
money than you need to.

NOTE You don’t have to get your hands dirty with all the steps and processes we talk about in this
chapter. You can certainly hire a datacenter consultant to help you optimize your datacenter.
A datacenter consultant should be able to help you consolidate and virtualize your datacenter
as well as optimize your cooling.

Cooling Costs

Some estimates state that cooling can account for upward of 63 percent of your IT
department’s power usage. That’s obviously a big amount and not something that should
be overlooked. If you need more cooling power, rather than simply turning up the air
conditioning, it’s useful to figure out how much you’re actually spending and how much
you actually need to spend.

How Much Does Power Cost?
Let’s take a moment to understand how much power costs and how those costs are
computed. Electricity is paid for per kilowatt-hour (kWh). This is a measure of the hourly
consumption of electrical power. For the sake of easy math, let’s use a basic electrical
device—the household incandescent light bulb—to determine how much electricity costs.

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