EL CERRITO, Calif. — Vigilent®, a provider of dynamic cooling management™ systems, announced that it has worked with Avnet Inc., a leading global technology distributor, to improve the cooling energy efficiency of Avnet's North American data center.

Avnet deployed Vigilent technology in its 13,000-square-foot data center as part of a large IT management initiative to significantly conserve energy and reduce environmental impact at the 25-year-old facility. As part of this project, Avnet used Vigilent to gain a more granular understanding of cooling throughout the data center floor, maintain consistent temperatures, improve cooling redundancy, and automatically control computer room air conditioners (CRACs) for maximum efficiency.

The Vigilent system automatically adjusts cooling resources to match IT load in real time, eliminating CRAC “fighting” (simultaneous heating and cooling), and turning redundant CRACs off or down to ensure that consistent temperatures are maintained within desired thresholds. The cooling-related energy savings contributed to the success of the larger Avnet IT initiative, saving the company millions of dollars and enabling it to avoid a multi-million dollar power build out to the data center. As a result of the success of its overall IT energy conservation initiative, Avnet was awarded the 2013 Green Enterprise IT Award™ in the IT Retrofit category by the Uptime Institute.

“The information provided by Vigilent helps us evaluate equipment performance and identify changes that we can make to our data center to further optimize our efficiency,” said Bruce Gorshe, director of data center operations for Avnet. “Our analysts use the Vigilent data on a regular basis, and Vigilent plays a key role in helping us reduce our energy consumption and related operating costs.”

Within Avnet, the Vigilent system integrates with CA Technologies' ecoMeter DCIM front-end to provide real-time information about CRAC power use. Avnet consolidates its energy power use for efficiency analysis and reporting.

“Avnet is a great example of how companies can avoid expensive IT build-outs while managing continued IT growth by applying DCIM and cooling optimization,” said Dan Mascola, Vigilent product marketing manager. “Avnet’s proactive thinking and success are well-evidenced by the multiple IT industry awards for data center efficiency that they have received in the last five years. Avnet provides a powerful benchmark for what forward-thinking companies can achieve.”

Vigilent said it uses artificial intelligence and direct control to dynamically manage data center cooling resources to meet real-time demand in the most efficient way possible. It scales to address variable IT loads, capacity planning, and airflow management.

For more information, visit www.vigilent.com.

Publication date: 11/18/2013

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