Future Facilities announced the development of its ACE Performance Score, which allows data center owner-operators to accurately track and improve the performance of their facilities.
The score is arrived at by means of the company's ACE Data Center Performance Assessment service, which measures data center performance at any point in time and allows the data center operator to decide how best to meet their operational goals. The company says the new ACE Performance Score metric allows data center managers to do this in a sustainable and repeatable way, allowing them to exercise much greater control over increases in downtime, cost per kW of IT load, and total cost of ownership.
According to Future Facilities, the score is derived from a confluence of predictive modeling and DCIM data measuring the three interconnected variables that ultimately determine how costly a data center is: availability (i.e. uptime and resilience); physical capacity; and cooling efficiency (hence, 'ACE'). The ACE Performance Score presents a new way of assessing, balancing and visualizing these critical indicators of data center performance. The score works by mapping data (for example, inventory and "real-time" power) from DCIM toolsets into a 3D virtual facility model. With that automated process accomplished, the model then simulates the resulting distribution of airflow and temperature in the space.
Related: New data center metric identifies stranded cooling capacity
“The people responsible for the operation of the data center cannot predict the engineering impact of moves, additions or changes made to the IT load," says Hassan Moezzi, CEO of Future Facilities. "In a dynamic environment, each and every change has an effect upon data center capacity, resilience or efficiency. The ACE Performance Score will give our customers a way to assess how compromised their data center is, to then improve it, and finally to maintain it in future operations.”
Ultimately, Future Facilities says the ACE Performance Score plots a data center’s performance gap, defined as the difference between a facility's maximum design potential and what can be achieved in day-to-day data center operations. Once the performance gap has been identified, data center professionals can make informed decisions about which variables to protect, which to sacrifice, where to save money, how to lessen the impact of change and how to ensure data center investments are maximized.
In trials of the ACE Performance Score, Future Facilities says that it saved a major financial institution $10 million by assessing and improving a single 24,000 sq. foot data center -- a facility that already had been operating with an extensive DCIM toolset. Learn more.
See also: Re-defining data center economics