Modius Data Center Blog

As a follow-up to our inaugural blog post regarding our implementation of continuous PUE monitoring at Sybase,  I wanted to share a real-world challenge Sybase recently encountered. Although Sybase is acknowledged as one of the country’s most efficient, reliable data centers, it is not without its unexpected challenges.

This spring, Sybase narrowly avoided a significant outage due to an unforeseen water leak from outside the walls of its data center. On each floor, directly above its high-availability Secure Data Center facility, are several kitchenettes (for the offices on that particular floor). On a recent weekend, a water hose popped in one of the kitchenettes connecting the sink to a cooler. Water gushed out and quickly flooded the kitchen. Worse, it eventually found its way down two stories between the walls to the data center facility below.

Sybase did not learn about the problem until one its PDUs was shut down by the leak. Luckily, its PDU redundancy avoided any outage. However, this unforeseeable leak resulted in a damaged PDU and a few downed servers.

To avoid an event such as this happening in the future, Sybase turned to Modius. Modius identified a cost-effective leak detection system to be installed in each of the kitchenettes in the building. We configured these residential-scale leak controller systems on the Modius Device Gateway and added it to the notification schema, demonstrating the versatility of our OpenData® system to capture data from practically any device used inside or outside a data center.

By utilizing one of the existing Modius I/O modules, we were able to configure and test the entire system in about 2.5 hours, providing Sybase a quick, cost-effective means to avoid an event such as this in the future.

Kind regards,
Jay H. Hartley, PhD
Director of Professional ServicesJay.Hartley[at]Modius.com

As part of our on-going efforts to keep customers fully informed on the latest innovations at Modius, we have initiated this customer blog.  In the future, I will regularly send out updates on new product innovations and examples of how customers are using Modius OpenData (our flagship product) in the field.

Recently, we updated the data capture capabilities at Sybase in order to provide them with more granular Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) reports. Greg Bush, the Data Center Manager at Sybase, is one of the industry’s leading advocates of comprehensive efficiency reporting.

The PUE reporting and Computed Points capability is contained in our recent release V2.6.

PUE reports are presented in three formats:

For the Sybase installation, we first instrumented for overall data center consumption. We installed a Dent PowerScout 18 power meter on the two automatic transfer switches (ATS) feeding the Sybase data center. This meter collects current (Amps) from the three phases plus neutral on each switch. ooking up the voltage leads requires the power to be shut down, so we didn’t connect them at this time.

In the future, we will connect the voltage leads during a scheduled shutdown. In the meantime, we are using computed points to estimate the real power using nominal voltage and power factor values.  The Computed Points capability in DCiM provides extended mathematic or Boolean calculations to the Native Points captured from devices.

More hints and successes with this new capability will be offered in future blog posts.

We also added a meter on the ATS that feeds the dedicated chiller for the data center. (A short system shut-down was possible in this case, so we connected the voltages and are measuring real power directly.)

With the combination of these two meters, we can now monitor the total power used by the data center.   The next step was to breakdown consumption.

The IT load is already metered through 12 PDUs and 8 power meters that have been part of the Modius’ monitoring system for years. astly, we created computed points to estimate the power loss across the UPSs based on input current, voltage and output real power.

Please note that in this case Greg Bush has achieved a PUE of 1.41. This low PUE is a testament to all the skill and hard work that Greg has put into optimizing his facility.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Kind regards,
Jay H. Hartley, PhD
Director of Professional Services
Jay.Hartley@Modius.com