Harnessing Digital Twin Technology for Data Center Airflow Management

All IT equipment, including those equipped with direct-to-chip liquid cooling, generates a significant amount of heat that must be cooled via air movement. Managing airflow has always been a significant consideration in data center design and operations, but as cabinet densities increase, it has become vital for maintaining efficiency and ensuring reliable operations.

With environmental regulations looming and the crunch in available data center power driving extensions of legacy facilities, operators need to be fully confident in their ability to meet the challenges presented by internal airflow management. Failure to follow through may result in negative consequences.

Data Center Internal Airflow Challenges

• Maximizing resilience: Always ensuring that all IT stays within its thermal envelope
• Maximizing capacity: Aligning cooling delivery with power and space availability
• Maximizing efficiency: Minimizing the energy required to move the air and reject the heat

The key to meeting these challenges is to know exactly where the air is flowing, how much is moving, and what temperature it is. As air is invisible, traditional airflow management techniques have relied on physically constraining where air can go and taking spot measurements of temperature and pressure as indicators of the whole environment.

Current Technologies and Their Limitations

Several methods are commonly employed to manage airflow in data centers, each with its own challenges:

• Physically constraining air paths: Hot and cold aisles, aisle containment, and blanket cabinets are all examples of techniques for constraining the paths that airflow can take. Adoption of these has allowed a significant improvement in data center efficiency, but there are limits to how tightly air can practically be controlled while retaining operational flexibility. Additionally, retrofitting such schemes to legacy facilities can have unintended consequences and must be planned carefully.
• Monitoring environmental conditions: Measurements of temperature and pressure are used to understand the environmental conditions within a data center, but they are unable to truly give the full picture of the airflow and how it might be affected by a change. For example, if a sensor measures 25°C at the front of a cabinet, is that a large pool of 25°C air that can be used by a new deployment, or will the new servers pull from warmer air sitting above the sensor?

The primary challenge with these traditional methods is the lack of visibility into airflow dynamics, which makes it difficult to fully optimize cooling capacity and efficiency.

Role of Digital Twins

Digital twin technology has emerged as a transformative tool in data center management, particularly for optimizing airflow. By creating a virtual replica of the physical data center environment, digital twins offer a multitude of benefits that address the inherent challenges in traditional airflow management strategies.

The Cadence Reality Digital Twin Platform addresses the current limitations with a groundbreaking approach to airflow management in data centers. By utilizing advanced simulation technologies, this platform provides a comprehensive view of airflow patterns, temperature distributions, and pressure variations within the data center environment. While these outputs are of great use for engineering deep dives and root cause analysis of issues, the Cadence Reality Digital Twin Platform also uses this raw data to calculate key metrics in the language of data center operators that give actionable insight and drive operational decision-making without requiring engineering expertise.

This brings the following key benefits:

• Streamline deployment decisions with cooling capacity at the cabinet, aisle, and zone levels: The digital twin uses its knowledge of airflow paths, temperature, and the facilities' cooling capacity to provide a potential cooling capacity at each cabinet. This allows deployment decisions to be taken with more confidence.
• Get temperature alerts for equipment not yet in the data center: Equipment planned to be deployed in the data center can be added to the digital twin, and the resulting environment can be simulated. Any resulting thermal alarms will be reported, and mitigating action will be suggested, all before the equipment has even been delivered!
• Identify stranded capacity by comparing cooling and power delivery: The digital twin combines cooling simulation with power system simulation. This allows a quick and easy comparison of where cooling availability and power delivery are not aligned and capacity has become stranded.
• Stress test resilience: The Cadence Reality Digital Twin platform can automatically estimate the worst-case cooling failure scenario based on current conditions and the facility's redundancy scheme, simulate those conditions, and provide a report. Additionally, the digital twin can simulate any failure scenario, allowing for the resilience of the cooling system to be truly stress-tested. Want to know what would happen if three CRAHs failed during peak customer demand on the hottest day of the year? The digital twin can tell you.
• Improve efficiency by reducing ineffective cooling: The digital twin traces the air from each cooling system component to its destination, calculating an effectiveness score based on how much actually reaches the IT equipment. This gives operators a quick way to identify cooling components that are candidates for removal or shut down, improving the cooling system's efficiency.

Enhancing Data Center Efficiency and Resilience

Effective internal airflow management is vital for the efficient operation of data centers. While traditional methods provide a foundation, they fall short in terms of adaptability and precision. Digital twin technology revolutionizes internal airflow management in data centers through informed decision-making and virtual testing capabilities. These benefits collectively contribute to increased agility and resilience, reduced energy consumption, improved cooling efficiency, and prolonged equipment longevity, positioning digital twins as an indispensable tool for modern data center operations.

With access to focused data based on detailed simulations, decision-making becomes more informed and strategic. Digital twins facilitate better planning by providing operators with both better upfront data to guide the initial decision and insight into the outcome of that decision and its impact on resilience and cooling efficiency before committing to the change. This capability ensures that any changes to the physical environment are backed by robust data, minimizing risks and maximizing returns on investment.

Ultimately, the precise control and optimization of airflow facilitated by digital twins lead to enhanced cooling efficiency. By maintaining ideal operating conditions, the strain on cooling systems is minimized, and the lifespan of IT equipment is extended. This ensures that data centers operate smoothly and efficiently, safeguarding critical IT assets and supporting uninterrupted digital services. The Cadence Reality Digital Twin Platform offers a sophisticated solution, transforming how airflow can be visualized and managed. By integrating this technology, data center operators can significantly improve efficiency, cost savings, and overall performance, ensuring their facilities remain robust and reliable in an increasingly digital world.

Learn More

• Cadence Reality Digital Twin Platform
• Tradeoffs in Managing Data Center External Airflow
• Why Does a Data Center Need a Digital Twin?