Various energy and environmental metrics, monitored in real time and over extended periods, can be of enormous help to data center operators in rapidly identifying familiar incidents that affect data center performance. For example, new tools available today can record the impact of a partial power outage on temperatures and power metrics.

Figure 1 shows a partial power failure and its direct impact on temperature change. Note that the partial power outage has led to a drop in power demand for the monitored electric load. Figure 2 shows how cold aisle (inlet) and hot aisle (exhaust) temperatures start equalizing due to a partial power failure of the cooling system. In Figure 3, the same root cause generates a quick temperature rise in the IT server room, generating threshold alerts.

Operators can leverage this correlation and analysis of metrics to adjust their thresholds and get quickly alerted to a set of events that they have identified as a partial power outage. When such events occur, they can immediately contact maintenance services to correct the root cause and/or properly shut down the servers, avoiding even more serious damage.

Figure-1: Temperature versus Power Outage

Figure-2: Watch the lab server inlet and exhaust temperatures equalize

Figure-3: Watch the IT server room temperatures rise