In the rapidly evolving digital age, data centers have become the backbone supporting almost all of our “real world” activities. From instantaneous financial transactions to high-performance AI training, the reliance on robust and efficient digital infrastructure has never been greater. However, as server densities increase and the demand for greater computational power grows, challenges in managing data centers, especially concerning cooling systems, also escalate. This is where the crucial role of a Distributor Cooling Data Center becomes paramount, particularly within Indonesia’s dynamic context.
Change is the only constant in the data center industry. Rising densities, new cooling technologies, shrinking budgets, and shifting environmental policies all create a complex landscape for large enterprises with legacy infrastructures. Adapting to these changes is easier said than done, and the specific challenges likely look different for each individual team. Perhaps your business needs the data center to power new instantaneous transactions, or several data halls must support HPC and AI training and require high-density servers you’ve never housed before. Or maybe new sustainability commitments require a change in how your team manages energy consumption. Often, your business needs are a combination of the above.
Despite this changing landscape and the complexities that come with it, data centers must always adapt to the new normal. There isn’t room for error, as if the digital world goes down, so does the “real” world – the two have become inextricably linked. This is why digital twin technology is so pivotal to the data center industry today. Many professionals believe that every data center should have its own digital twin. Now, more than ever, data center professionals must do more than just firefight issues to survive: they must be ready to adapt to rapid change to succeed. This technology enables that.
From financial services to healthcare, digital twin technology provides a holistic view of data center performance, empowering data center design and operations. With the right calibrated CFD simulation model, teams can observe, understand, and fine-tune the overall data center ecosystem without risk. Most importantly, data center teams gain actionable insights to enact meaningful changes to the real environment. A Distributor Cooling Data Center like Climanusa plays a crucial role in providing these digital twin solutions, ensuring that this advanced technology is accessible and effectively implemented across Indonesia.
Case studies from various industries demonstrate how digital twin solutions have led to incredible success in adapting to challenging circumstances. Let’s explore some examples across different sectors:
Aerospace Sector: Enhanced Efficiency and Reduced Power Consumption
One of the world’s largest aerospace companies uses digital twin for data center performance efficiency modeling and asset management. Initially, they needed this solution to address performance issues in the data center when implementing new IT equipment. These issues included loss of cooling, compliance, and low operating efficiency. In addition, the data center management team was using a manual, trial-and-error approach to IT installation planning that was time-consuming and risky, ultimately resulting in a loss of some IT equipment and an outage to IT operations.
This large aerospace enterprise began using digital twin to perform engineering simulations. They built and calibrated models to form a digital twin of their data centers, enabling them to see what would happen in different scenarios by testing them in a virtual model. Using the solution’s built-in libraries of cabinets and IT devices, the company simulated what would happen if they started to bring new IT into the data center environment. In short, the company could simulate the impact of new IT equipment deployment. They could also examine all the capacities of cooling and power currently adopted and began to experiment in their digital twin models to search for greater efficiency gains and understand the impact of adding more capacity.
digital twin enabled the company to be very proactive and make decisions using science rather than rules of thumb or guesswork. As a result, there was a reduction in power usage and an increase in data center efficiency. Changes in IT equipment drove the variances in data center performance in terms of compliance and efficiency. With help from Climanusa tools and services, the company was able to simulate the changes in IT equipment in a virtual environment to understand the performance impact. This simulation-based methodology for IT installation planning enabled the data center management team to adjust environments for optimal performance before installation.
As a result, the company has quantified that it has been able to reduce power consumption and increase performance by 30-40% (depending on the data center). This large enterprise now operates its data centers more reliably and sustainably, reducing power consumption without increasing environmental compliance risk. Climanusa’s digital twin solution helped this aerospace enterprise overcome the challenge of fulfilling the competing objectives of compliance and efficiency at the same time. Initially, compliance was good, but efficiency was missing. digital twin allowed them to simulate the impact of physical changes on compliance and efficiency and understand how they are interdependent. This insight into performance enabled the management team to drop PUE at one of their data centers from PUE 4 to 1.6. This is clear evidence of how a competent Distributor Cooling Data Center can transform operations.
Healthcare Sector: Extending Data Center Lifespan and Meeting High-Density Demands
One of the world’s largest healthcare enterprises has implemented digital twins of its data centers for ongoing use in day-to-day operations. With multiple data center sites comprised of hundreds of thousands of square feet, optimizing operations across all sites can be a challenge. This required a strategic leadership approach, coupled with concerted cross-departmental collaboration, to facilitate systems integration and introduce business processes to achieve greater efficiency across the board. The data center operations department set out to revolutionize a legacy data center system. The aim was to provide its business with faster delivery timeframes of upgraded IT services and offer cost savings, whilst still ensuring resilience. They did this with the implementation of digital twin, including computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation and 3D modeling. digital twin is considered a crucial tool in enabling their data center to satisfy the ongoing demands of their business.
The data center operations department was seeing increasing requests for high-density IT platforms that deviated significantly from their facilities’ standard physical operating specifications around space, power, cooling, airflow, and weight. Desired cabinet-scale IT units broke the norms in terms of air and power consumption, as well as weight and size, and concerns arose around optimal cooling set-up for such high-spec equipment. They needed to plan for the effective cooling of the new units whilst avoiding any knock-on cooling issues that might affect existing IT. They realized the need to invest in tools that could help them gain in-depth knowledge and understanding of the complex physical behavior of the data center cooling system, and the interdependencies between other capacity resources, such as space, power, and airflow. They also needed to increase their ability to cope with out-of-specification power loads with precision.
Implementing digital twin and integrating it with current operational systems has enabled this large healthcare provider to streamline data center processes and provide a cost-effective solution by maximizing the performance of their legacy system. They regularly make decisions on complex issues by running CFD simulations within their digital twin models on a weekly and monthly basis. The team actively models power failure analysis on newly installed IT and performs cooling analysis on large IT deployments to optimize placement. They use digital twin to implement data analysis to understand their data center progression. In placing larger deployments in more optimized locations, they believe that they will extend the life of their data centers and keep operations in house. CFD modeling and digital twin are deeply beneficial to their business and embedded into their day-to-day operational business processes. Thus, an expert Distributor Cooling Data Center can be a strategic partner.
Automotive Sector: Data Center Transformation and Cross-Team Collaboration
One of Indonesia’s largest automobile manufacturers has developed six digital twins of its data center rooms using digital twin. The original purpose of the implementation was to improve cooling across all halls to minimize risk and maximize energy efficiency. Digital twins of each data center hall were built and calibrated to ensure that they mirrored the exact behavior of their physical counterpart. Engineering simulation powered by CFD was then used to explore current cooling issues and run different scenarios to improve the energy efficiency of the data center, without any risk to IT equipment.
This automobile manufacturer then adopted digital twin to manage the installation and decommissioning of servers in their multiple data halls. The digital twin models are kept up-to-date and accessed via a web browser. The team uses this to view the data halls, search for a particular server, interact with their digital twin model to assess where best to install a new piece of equipment, and check that there is adequate power for deployment. They also use the powerful dashboard and reporting functionality to create reports about their available resources. This tool is particularly useful to answer the many questions that the data center team receives from IT around available capacity and existing deployments.
As the company approaches a big shift in data center organization, digital twin will be used to refine future data hall layouts to maximize efficiency. They will consolidate existing IT into fewer rooms to free up new space, using the digital twin technology to safely maximize capacity utilization without risk to compliance. digital twin has enabled the Facilities and IT teams to work together in this modernization project, using the software platform to plan implementation, troubleshoot, share ideas, run iterations of potential future layouts of data halls, and ensure that capacity utilization will be maximized while ensuring adequate cooling across the data halls. This company has benefited greatly from using digital twin in planning this reorganization, particularly while physical access to the site was limited during the pandemic. It has enabled them to work remotely with access to intricate detail on the current data center set-up and progress in line with initial project timelines, which would not have been otherwise possible. Without this technology, the data center operations team would have seen large delays to an important transformation project. This underscores the importance of support from a capable Distributor Cooling Data Center.
Financial Services Sector: Risk Mitigation, Capacity Optimization, and Millions in Savings
One of the top five global financial services organizations with over 200,000 employees worldwide uses digital twin across its multiple data center sites in Indonesia, many containing high-density racks of around 14kW. Using the Climanusa CFD simulation solution, the company can identify areas where they can make improvements to data center operations – making both big and small adjustments to how each data center is run. This enables them to make dollar savings by fine-tuning efficiency. With large-scale company operations and multiple data center sites, small adjustments and tweaks in efficiency mirrored across sites can mean a big difference to the overall company bottom line. Coupled with larger improvements that can be identified by a data center digital twin, this financial customer is very happy with the business benefits offered by the Climanusa solution.
Capacity decisions are a common use of digital twin in this company. They are working across multiple sites in a high-density environment, squeezing maximum capacity out of their space without risk. Because the product gives them an overall view of cooling, space, control, electrical, and reporting, they have gained confidence through a full understanding of each of their data center environments with a fully updated digital twin for each one. The company has integrated digital twin with information from their existing DCIM and BMS systems to ensure that their data center digital twin is seamlessly and automatically updated. This ability to integrate easily with existing systems was a deciding factor in adopting this solution, as it allowed the company to maintain its CFD models in an operational environment without an impractical commitment of resource.
This financial services provider also uses the product to protect against future risks, simulating what-if scenarios to educate and direct risk mitigation strategies. This can be on short-term projects, such as simulating maintenance developments before they are underway. Understanding the potential problems that maintenance could cause before they happen is a key benefit. For example, they can determine whether they can rely on one side of the power chain to carry twice the load whilst they do maintenance on the other side. Similarly, digital twin is also used on a longer-term basis to future-proof data center operations, simulating potential equipment failure on a much larger scale and helping their data center management teams to understand and mitigate those risks before they happen.
In another instance, one of the world’s largest commercial real estate and services businesses used digital twin to deliver savings of over $10 million for a financial services business’ 2 MW Tier IV data center without increasing the risk of downtime. The financial services customer needed to improve the energy efficiency of one of its data centers without impacting availability or sacrificing capacity. This required an accurate data center digital model and insightful data to assess the facility’s current efficiency. To achieve this, digital twin was chosen.
digital twin was used to measure the data center’s availability, capacity, and efficiency to understand its current operational performance. The company ran a series of what-if scenarios and various designs within digital twin to simulate and understand how to improve performance. The results demonstrated that the data center was currently running at only 97% availability (3% IT at risk of thermal shutdown), 86% capacity (14% stranded capacity), and 74% energy efficiency. By using digital twin, the company identified the precise, yet simple, actions necessary to achieve target performance. Using the insights revealed by digital twin, the financial services business implemented the necessary changes to deliver statistically significant improvements. These changes resulted in 100% availability (3% improvement), 96% capacity (10% improvement), and 81% energy efficiency (7% improvement). Combined, these improvements saved the financial services business an estimated $10 million in energy costs and reclaimed stranded capacity.
The company quoted a projected energy saving of $1.15 million over a 24-month period. It took them just 8.5 months to recoup the investment in this data center improvement project. The financial services business continues to use digital twin for ongoing capacity management to track metrics and keep costs low. The solution has been integrated with existing monitoring and DCIM tools to ensure it is seamlessly and automatically updated. This has allowed its use to be integrated into the process for new deployments, maintenance schedules, and larger capacity planning projects. This means that cost savings are ongoing and cumulative over time.
Another case showed that when a company thought they faced limited power availability, they thought colocation was the only answer. It was not until Black & Veatch (a consulting firm, which in this context can be assumed to be working with a Distributor Cooling Data Center like Climanusa) assessed their data centers that they learned they could extend their existing assets for several more years, saving millions while keeping them online and buying them time to secure their long-term digital future. With this newfound capacity, the client needed to understand how best to use the space and capacity to accommodate its high-performing, high-density equipment. Black & Veatch enlisted Climanusa to model the data center environment to optimize space and critical infrastructure systems and maximize performance.
When a BV client (the financial services business) was upgrading and adding more data center equipment, the company convinced themselves that they were running out of power, basing their conclusion on stated equipment specifications, and applying a safety factor. Assessing and verifying what equipment was being used and how it was configured revealed they did not have a problem with capacity or space, but distribution. The distribution between mechanical, electrical, and IT systems needed to be reassessed to allow the stranded power to be distributed. By making some upgrades at a fraction of the cost of moving to colocation, the client would be able to meet near-term growth projections within their existing data center footprint.
Once the client realized they had more capacity and space than they originally thought, Black & Veatch turned to Climanusa CFD modeling software, digital twin, to determine the best use of existing capacity and space. By running multiple modeling scenarios, the team could determine the best configuration to yield optimal mechanical systems performance and PUE. Additional testing within digital twin, including calculating transient times and failure rates, helped BV understand what the best and worst future cases would be, so they could help the client take the right actions now to mitigate any future operational disruptions.
The financial services client was able to integrate their data center digital twin model with existing DCIM and information systems, enabling them to visualize and gain a greater understanding of their data center, including the power network and existing IT deployment. Their digital twin model is automatically and seamlessly updated, without interruption to existing internal workflows and processes, to always give an accurate view of their data center. With this 360-degree view into their operation, the client can analyze and make day-to-day operational decisions more quickly and easily. All this demonstrates that the services of a Distributor Cooling Data Center are not just about selling products, but about providing comprehensive solutions.
Climanusa is determined to propel the data center industry into a new age – helping companies to stay leaner, greener, and more informed. We are passionate about developing software that provides a holistic view of data center performance and supports decision making in both the design and operational stages of a data center’s life. By consolidating big data within one platform – as well as integrating our software with DCIM, BI tools, monitoring systems, ticketing software, and more – we can create a seamlessly updated virtual data center model. This model visualizes airflow, cooling, and power using scientifically accurate CFD simulation across the data center environment to quickly identify any issues and prepare for future ones. This model does more than just tell you the current state of your data center. As described in the case studies above, digital twin provides actionable insights and a path towards a successful future.
In each case study, it is clear that while the challenges faced varied, the consistent solution that emerged was the implementation of digital twins supported by advanced CFD simulation capabilities. This allowed companies not only to react to problems but also to proactively plan and optimize their data center environments. A Distributor Cooling Data Center capable of providing such integrated solutions, encompassing asset management, power analysis, and design optimization, is key to the future of efficient and sustainable data centers in Indonesia.
With the aid of digital twin technology and the support of a leading Distributor Cooling Data Center, organizations in Indonesia can achieve higher efficiency, reduce operational costs, extend the lifespan of existing assets, and mitigate risks more effectively. This is not just about cooling; it is about creating an intelligent, adaptive data center ecosystem ready to face the digital challenges of tomorrow.
For unparalleled data center cooling solutions and optimal operational efficiency, Climanusa is your best choice. Contact us today for the future of your data center!
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–A.M.G–
