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You’ve taken the necessary steps to protect your data center from thermal failure; you’ve built redundancy into your cooling system and have all the latest monitoring alarms in place. And yet, during critical operations, some part of your cooling fails and the next thing you know, your digital infrastructure is offline. 

Something similar took place at Microsoft Azure's UK South region data center, where a cooling loss caused an outage and the facility was forced to stop for roughly 10 hours. The UK government’s Covid-19 information portal was among those impacted by this outage (DCD).

It’s not news that data center outages have very real consequences for business. What is news, however, is how the Data Center Digital Twin can help. 

Know what comes next with the Digital Twin

Merely adopting current best practices isn’t enough to overcome the new and evolving challenges data center owner-operators face. From high-density designs to liquid cooled facilities, data centers have become too complex for blanket solutions. 

In an ideal world, you can simply plan to have enough power and cooling to keep up with future changes, but with each new deployment your layout changes. And just implementing the same total cooling won’t have the necessary impact. Two different layouts, even with the same total cooling, can produce drastically different results. Virtually testing your layout’s resilience by performing a failure-analysis can be the tipping point between an optimized data center and a data center outage.

Figure 1. Perform failure-analysis with data center simulation to know how your data center will perform under duress.

As the following video demonstrates (only 2 minutes and 20 seconds!), with physics-based simulation, you can catch what current best practices miss. Predicting and seeing airflow is pivotal to designing and operating a data center that can keep up with constant updates and changes. Only physics-based simulation can do that. 

Data center resilience starts with simulation

Your data center’s resilience is of the upmost importance to you, your team, and the business it supports. In this blog, we’ve debunked the myth that blanket solutions can be enough to keep up with today’s challenges and positioned data center simulation as the best and only method to know what comes next. 

We know there are a lot more data center simulation myths out there, such as “CFD models are hard to set up” or “environmental monitoring is more than enough to safeguard my data center.” This blog spells out our quick start implementation for the Digital Twin and this short video series breaks down common misconceptions about data center environmental monitoring.

That being said, every data center is different. We’d love to get in contact to discuss your data center’s unique challenges here.

Blog written by: Danielle Gibson, Lead Marketing Editor, and Robert Schmidt, Director of Sales + Client Innovation - Data Center Infrastructure Software SME