Arno van Gennip, vice president of global IBX operation engineering at Equinix, said: "From design to construction to facility management, digital pairing is becoming the key to improving data center efficiency and reducing customers' carbon emissions. "
Digital pairing helps to concentrate the data in different key fields into the enjoyment environment, enabling IT, engineering, finance, procurement and construction teams to explore and simulate the trade-offs between performance, finance and environment at the early stage of the process. The direct impact of various efficiency improvements in equipment and space utilization is to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. Digital pairing also helps to improve the efficiency of construction and operation, reduce waste, reduce personnel demand and related environmental impact.
Many enterprises and data center operators (such as Nvidia) may create digital twin workflows from various analog modeling tools, which combine the functions of engineering, CAD and data center information management (DCIM). More and more DCIM manufacturers (such as Schneider Electric) directly introduce the digital twinning function into their tools. Vendors such as dassault systemes and Future Facilities provide more integrated digital twins for data centers. Manufacturers such as NVIDIA have also begun to introduce new tools such as Nvidia Air to optimize the physical and logical layout of data centers.
put in force
Equinix cooperates with Future Facilities to build digital twins for enterprise data centers. Digital pairing can help engineers ensure that the cooling system and the connected ecosystem provide the required capacity and the best efficiency. Engineers can compare the expected behavior and actual behavior of the data center, as well as energy use.
"This gives us an insight into the possibility of maintaining and optimizing energy efficiency," said van Gennip.
Equinix engineers and partners worked together to build a 3D model of the physical data center. This twin model of data center is based on various factors, such as the capacity and density of computing equipment in the data center and the path of cooling system. Centralized digital dual platform can help engineers to predict the possible impact of predicted changes on power distribution, space utilization and cooling path by using real-time data (such as power and temperature). These real-time data are integrated into the existing models for accurate analysis and prediction, so that data center twins can improve efficiency by predicting energy demand.
Dassault cooperates with many leading hyperscale data center enterprises to design and build the next generation data center.
Marty Rozmanith, sales strategy director of Dassault Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, said: "The biggest challenge they face is how to shorten the project preparation time to keep up with the growing demand, and how to make the data center more sustainable by reducing energy and water consumption and waste during construction and operation.
Make management easier.
Kasper Dessing, director of global building management optimization at Digital Realty, a data center real estate investment trust company, believes that in the past, data center management was divided into several islands, and each island focused on a certain aspect of management facilities.
Therefore, managers in different fields may not see the bigger picture. This is especially important when considering the maintenance of facilities now and in the future. Data center will produce a lot of data, but human beings can't capture, collect and manage these data well. As digital services become more and more complex, this situation will only get worse.
Dessing said: "Through digital pairing, we can present various elements and dynamics in the facility in a virtual way, and simulate the actual behavior in real time in various operating scenarios."
Digital Realty found that due to the huge amount of data and the interdependence between different components, the operation of general data centers is not good enough. Because of this, Digital Realty combines the digital twins of their facilities with proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms to analyze thousands of data streams, so that all components in the facilities can be tracked and adjusted in real time, and future behaviors can be predicted, so as to carry out predictive maintenance, save time and reduce costs.
This visibility into the relationship between facilities and different components helps to improve the design of new facilities and make them more efficient. Not only that, Digital Realty also uses digital twins and its artificial intelligence platform to optimize energy consumption.
Desing said: "Sustainable development is our top priority, and optimizing the energy consumption of each facility will help us reduce costs and reduce the impact on the environment."
Not everyone has the technical expertise to simulate when making a decision, so Digital Realty integrates a recommendation engine into their digital twin platform.
"In this way, more people can use this technology instead of relying on experts all the time."
Put the pieces together.
During the design, construction and operation of data center, a large amount of data will be generated, which are stored in different formats and systems. Rozmanith said that it is very challenging to manage and organize data through proper access control and change management. Digital pairing can bring multi-disciplinary, different levels of development (LOD) and multi-dimensional data, which enables different stakeholders to collaborate in real time around a single fact source. These more complex digital pairing technologies combine various technologies and use integrated digital pairing to simulate thermal, structural, electrical, control and monitoring, manufacturing and assembly processes.
Rozmanith explained: "Through a common platform, everyone can work around a single source of facts, which not only saves time, but also improves the quality and overall data center delivery capacity. This platform is the driving force for our change. "
Teresa Tung, chief technical expert of Accenture Cloud, said: "As we integrate more data and simulations to connect engineering design, construction scheduling and operation processes, interoperability between different digital twins has become a big challenge."
Tung's team is working with data center suppliers to apply data and domain expertise to the analysis process to determine the number and configuration of simulations needed to drive hypothetical forecasting. They use domain knowledge maps (the same technology used in Internet search) to capture these requirements and map the relationships between different elements.
Carsten Baumann, Director of Schneider's Strategic Planning and Solutions Architect, said that providers are increasingly adding digital pairing function to DCIM tools to simulate the possible impact of infrastructure upgrade before actual deployment. He believes that open standards can simplify the integration between data center equipment and management tools, thus making it easier for digital twins to become a part of daily data center workflow.
Let's learn more about how 19 digital twins can improve the sustainability of design, construction, operation and planning:
design
Place a new server
"Perhaps in the data center industry, the biggest impact of using digital twin technology is airflow management and IT equipment placement," Bowman said.
The demand for deploying computing, storage and network resources is growing rapidly, which brings great challenges to infrastructure. Having physical space in a particular rack or location does not mean that there is enough power, channels and cooling capacity.
Digital pairing can help when seemingly simple installation and deployment may require a major upgrade of power supply or a better alternative.
Density increase
Increasing the equipment density in the data center can reduce the impact of new facilities on the climate.
Loren Absher, Director of Enterprise Agility of Information Services Group (ISG), said that digital twinning can help optimize the design of data centers and improve the integrity of all related elements, such as power supply, wiring, cooling requirements, airflow and even raised floors, to prevent catastrophic failures, and also help to change the physical workflow required to increase density.
Improve thermal performance
Cooling is the second largest energy consumption factor in the data center, second only to the equipment itself. The cooling system of modern data center includes coolers, pipes and HVAC equipment.
Digital twinning can use thermal simulation to understand the behavior of cooling system and improve its performance.
Rozmanith said that some people often combine the 1D simulation of the equipment chain representing the change of the number of water chillers and the pipe size with the 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of air flow to find the best balance between cold air and equipment cooling, so as to optimize energy consumption.
Assess seasonal effects
Dan Kirsch, managing director and co-founder of Techstrong Research, said that digital twinning can also help data center designers to better plan seasonal climate change, so that designers can plan ahead according to the impact of external seasonal climate change to reduce overall operating costs and energy consumption.
"Digital twins enable us to truly customize and optimize the design according to the specific needs of customers and site conditions, without field experiments," Kirsch said.
Create modular components
Dassault works with large data center operators to create modular components that can be reused in different data center designs.
Rozmanith said that digital twinning can help enterprises define and configure the properties of these modules, thus shortening the design, procurement and installation time by configuring according to orders, thus helping to reduce the environmental impact of new data centers.
Test and verification equipment
Bruno Berti, senior vice president of Americas products at NTT Global Data Center, said that they are using digital pairing technology to test and verify the equipment before deploying it to the data center.
These new workflows allow them to build and test electrical and generator modules, so that engineers can have any potential process failures before the products are put into production, reduce the impact of waste on the environment, improve risk assessment, speed up the development of new products, and improve the reliability and flexibility of data centers. In addition, digital pairing also helps to arrange predictive maintenance and reduce maintenance costs.
Optimize battery performance
Greg latter Ratcliff, chief innovation officer of Vertiv, a data center equipment manufacturer, said that digital twins can be used to model and design systems to improve battery health and life expectancy, thus reducing the environmental impact of manufacturing new batteries. In this case, digital pairing can help the team use battery health measurement and facility details to simulate different design options and predict the health status and service life of each battery.
Ratcliffe said: "If a single battery in the battery pack fails, the whole battery pack will fail, so it is very important to monitor the operation of each battery."
Evaluation of environmentally friendly alternatives
Data center operators can use digital pairing technology to evaluate the performance, environmental benefits and potential defects of the new method.
For example, Kao Data uses the digital twin tool to virtually test and deploy a refrigerant-free indirect evaporative cooling (IEC) system, which uses water evaporation instead of a mechanical system to cool air in hot weather. This method is helpful for Kao data to improve the efficiency of electricity consumption and reduce the impact on the environment.
build
Streamlined structure
Digital pairing can simulate complex tasks, assembly, equipment use and personal safety, and can also improve the cooperation among suppliers, integrators and contractors in the design and construction ecosystem to eliminate friction in the process.
Rozmanith said that better simulation and collaboration can shorten the construction time, reduce the occurrence of problems, avoid rework, and reduce the number of information requests and security incidents, which helps Dassault's customers shorten the time to market by 65,438+00-65,438+05% on average and reduce the possible environmental impact caused by long construction time.
Reduce construction waste
Data center designers are using digital pairing to better plan construction, so that employees can work more efficiently, reduce waste and shorten the time between different construction stages.
Kirsch said: "By creating a virtual model of the data center and a complete bill of materials, designers can optimize every detail of the data center assembled by construction workers."
This planning method can reduce the waiting time for one team to complete tasks in other teams. Generally speaking, it is not easy to reduce the waste in the process of data center construction. Kirsch said that many components in this process cannot be reused or recycled, and finally they can only enter the landfill.
run quickly
Provide maintenance advice
Digital twinning helps to determine the root cause of the problem and provide maintenance suggestions for rapid maintenance to reduce energy consumption.
For example, Equinix's factory in Amsterdam adopted a digital twin model. According to the model, they must clean the cooling tower and adjust the fan. In the past, the energy consumption of both kinds of maintenance was higher than expected by the model. Van Gennip said that digital pairing further improved the energy efficiency of IBX, an already very efficient data center, by 65,438+00%.
Extend the life of assets
Dassault's virtual digital twinning can contextualize the running data of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithm to improve predictive maintenance. Rhodes Manis said that this extended the service life of the equipment, thus reducing e-waste. In addition, virtual twins can optimize the use of energy and water by improving the efficiency of cooling and power systems.
Improve maintenance and repair efficiency
Digital pairing can simplify all information access required for maintenance, repair and renovation, including access to documents, user manuals, maintenance manuals, material supplier information and spare parts lists. Lorenz Hofmann, vice president of Vertiv's customized air handling and modular solutions, said that this can save time and reduce workload, thus reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Data center process automation
Improvements in process mining can help data center leaders understand how their teams interact with applications and how they respond to changes in the data center environment.
Ryan Raiker, senior director of process intelligence at ABBYY, said that the use of digital twin understanding and recording programs can help data center teams find candidate automation methods and implement different protocols to take actions when failures actually occur, thus ensuring the normal operation of data centers and reducing the occurrence of failures and waste.
Improve collaboration between hosting service providers and enterprises.
Hosted data center allows multiple enterprises to share the same data center, but after enterprise customers decide to install new equipment, it may affect the equipment of other nearby enterprises in terms of power, heat and weight.
Thésée data center in France cooperates with Future Forward to deploy digital twins of each facility in the cloud. This kind of digital twins enables customers to simulate the possible impact of their own or nearby equipment changes through the Web server, thus helping Thésée engineers to cooperate with customers, improve the space utilization of their data centers, and reduce the need to build new data centers.
plan
Ensure compliance requirements.
NTT is studying how to help enterprises collect and standardize business-related data through data matching. Data pairing copies enterprise data sources and their relationships into a standard format, providing a centralized location for analysis and reporting.
Bennett Indart, vice president of intelligent solutions for NTT data services, said that this will help to make progress in achieving the sustainable development goals of data centers and identify new opportunities for improvement.
Improve financial decision-making
Berti of NTT said that NTT has begun to integrate financial data into their digital twins, which helps NTT to use real-time data and advanced analysis functions to review material and labor costs in the planning process.
In addition, it helps to determine whether the adjustment of manufacturing value chain is reasonable from the financial point of view, and whether the expected results will reduce the operating costs of data centers.
Assess the impact of data center migration
Accenture cooperated with Carnegie Mellon University to develop a digital twin model named myNav Green Cloud Advisor, which allows enterprises to measure the sustainability impact of migration between data centers and cloud providers.
According to Tung of Accenture, the project started in the form of digital twins, which allows enterprises to plan and compare various cloud solutions based on current data center energy consumption, computing requirements and sustainable development goals, including carbon emission targets, location, energy and preparations for the transition to clean energy.
Understand the substantive impact
Kirsch said that it is often difficult to know the actual bill of materials of the data center before the construction is completed. During the construction of the data center, the team will encounter various situations that may need to deviate from the original design. The design team can use digital twins to plan all the site conditions and specify the required materials.
Kirsch said: "By making an accurate bill of materials, the founders and end users of the data center can fully understand the required materials and their impact on the overall sustainable development goals before the construction begins."