You don’t often think of Cisco Systems needing help with… well.. just about anything. Anyone who has ever been to their facilities knows this giant of a tech vendor is like one very big well oiled machine. And some of the technologies they use to run their business are every bit as impressive as the ones they sell you to run yours and your customers’.

I remember getting my first glimpse of a real, functioning, ready-for-enterprise-prime-time teleconferencing system during a Cisco briefing a full year before they rolled the gear our commercially. Sure it was developed with a product in mind, but these folks were making great use of the technology in their own business. They’re smart like that. That’s all I’m saying. Enough gushing.

It was a little surprising, therefore, to hear about Cisco reaching out to a lesser known, British software vendor called Future Facilities Ltd., a maker of design, optimization and management tools data centers. Cisco’s goal was looking to make improvements at its 10-year-old, 7,000-square-foot San Jose, Calif., data center. Here’s how that effort, fueled by the Future Facilities simulation tools and bit of imagination, will save Cisco $120,000 per year.

It started when a Cisco team led by engineering manager Chris Noland kicked off a project to improve energy efficiency at the facility filled with 3,202 units of IT equipment. The total energy bill for the facility was $1.4 million per year, including $660,000 annually in cooling energy costs and $707,000 per year in IT equipment energy costs.

Noland’s team started with the typical use of blanking panels and plastic curtains to prevent mixing of supply and return air. The methods are fairly effective, but came up short when Noland discovered that they only addressed room-level issues and not the more important thermal incompatibilities between IT equipment and cabinets. Noland also needed a way to predict future outcomes and performance in order to estimate ROI in support of the project, a tall order for the rudimentary solutions they were rolling out.

That’s when Noland settled on using Future Facilities' Virtual Facility simulation to create a detailed, 3D model of space, power and cooling behavior, including the thermal interactions between the room infrastructure, cooling system, cabinets and individual units of IT equipment. The VF analysis showed exhaust recirculation within cabinets was causing high IT equipment inlet temperatures forcing the over-chilling of water in the cooling system. Noland found that blanking and containment curtains in some cases actually increased inlet temperatures for many units.

The simulation results were used to guide the placement of floor grilles and blanking panels that lowered equipment inlet temperatures, making it possible to raise the chilled water set-point by 8°F. The increase in chilled water set point provided a 30 percent reduction in power required for cooling and will trim an estimated $120,000 per year off Cisco’s power bill.

"When it comes to data center efficiency, there are few larger gains than improving the heat removal architecture. The Virtual Facility is the best tool I've seen to tie together cooling, availability and efficiency in one analytic model. A very valuable tool for many data center operations," said Rob Aldrich, Cisco Principal for Energy Efficiency.