CoolEmAll Releases Prototype Datacenter Design Tools
The European Commission-funded project CoolEmAll has released prototype tools that facilitate the design of more energy-efficient datacenters. Project leaders are looking for interested parties to test and refine the tools before their official debut next year.
CoolEmAll takes a holistic approach to optimizing datacenter design. The project is developing advanced tools, blueprints, and other resources to assist datacenter designers, operators, and technology partners in building and operating more energy-efficient facilities. The toolsets help to elucidate the complex relationships between the hardware, the software (applications and workloads) and the power/cooling systems.
"Factors such as rising fuel prices, stricter environmental legislation and constrained credit amid the financial crisis are contributing to higher capital and operational costs for data centre owners and operators," said Andrew Donoghue, a senior analyst with 451 Research, a CoolEmAll consortium partner. "The tools and research that will result from the CoolEmAll project will help the data centre industry to meet some of these challenges, and develop more efficient and sustainable facilities."
The project's principle objective is the development of the Simulation, Visualisation and Decision Support Toolkit (SVD Toolkit). The full-featured tool allows datacenter designers to simulate new facilities in many different configurations. Users can control application profiles, hardware characteristics, management policies, and heat transfer, while a Web-based user interface represents this information in the form of 3D visualizations and detailed dashboards.
CoolEmAll is also architecting hardware and thermodynamic models that can be plugged into the simulation. These Data Centre Efficiency Building Blocks (DEBBs), as they're called, along with workload and application profiles, will be available as part of an open repository.
With a focus on supporting green IT designs, CoolEmAll is a key part of the Europe 2020 strategy to promote energy efficiency across the region. The 30-month endeavor began in 2011 and will conclude in early 2014.
The prototype tools are available for download now. Early adopters are invited to provide their feedback to help improve the toolset.
Check out this CoolEmAll GUI demonstration for more information. (There's no need to adjust your speaker volume because there's no sound.) A shorter version of the module demo is available here.
