Machine Learning
Analyze, learn, and adapt.
Machine learning is the foundation upon which the Vigilent Dynamic Cooling Management® System is built. Every minute, data from hundreds or thousands of environmental sensors is collected across the wireless mesh network, where it makes its way to the central artificial intelligence (AI) Engine. There, the data is analyzed and interpreted, and meaning is extracted. Trends are analyzed and patterns extracted from days, months, or years of historic data. The AI Engine creates an Influence Map® that shows how each cooling unit impacts temperature across the entire data center. Sophisticated dynamic control algorithms then send commands to the facility’s cooling system in real time, making decisions designed to optimize performance.
Our patented approach constantly learns the intricacies of your facility and, with closed-loop control, ensures that it is operating at top performance.
Our approach to machine learning
How our system works
Measuring and monitoring are a good and necessary start, but it’s essential to apply artificial intelligence and automatic control to manage the complex interactions among heating and cooling sources and airflow within the facility.
Machine learning analyzes historical performance to predict future behavior. It evaluates courses of action to determine the one that yields the optimum result, minimizing energy usage while protecting uptime. And it provides insights to help you make facility management decisions by uncovering the intricate and non-obvious relationships between heat loads and cooling resources.
Measure and monitor
Hundreds to thousands of wireless sensors throughout your facility gather environmental information every minute, and deliver those readings to the AI engine.
This is what’s known as Big Data – amounts of information that are large relative to the analytical tasks to be solved, and that can provide deep insight into relationships and trends.
Analyze and learn
The AI Engine constantly compares current environmental readings with desired ranges, historic trend data, the current load, and cooling resource availability and efficiency. It determines what changes need to occur to maintain desired temperatures with the least amount of cooling spend, using advanced algorithms fine-tuned to the very specific needs of this task.
Real behavior is compared to expected results, and the system continually learns and improves, as equipment behavior and environmental response are ever-more-accurately characterized.
Over time, the AI Engine evolves to provide increasingly optimized results.
Adapt and control
Adaptive control allows the system to respond to random and never-ending changes in the environment – whether it be the addition of more server racks, or someone closing a door to a room.
Commands are dispatched by the system to the cooling infrastructure, where they are automatically implemented by turning equipment on or off, or adjusting fan speeds. And this cycle continues over and over, in a closed-loop, with constant adjustments every minute of every day of every year from the moment it is deployed.
Unprecedented insight
Analytics help to surface long tail events.
By collecting data about your facility’s environmental performance every minute, and storing it indefinitely, the Vigilent system builds a data set that enable powerful analysis. The analytics used to decipher meaning out of this data can surface trends that might otherwise go unnoticed.
It is finding those rare and rarer events that enable us to reduce costs, deliver improved uptime, identify stranded capacity, and provide the non-intuitive insights that can help you rethink how your facilities are architected.
The Vigilent AI Engine
The Vigilent AI Engine contains the sophisticated machine learning software that makes everything possible. The software can be delivered as a virtual image, or on a special-purpose, dedicated hardware appliance. Either way, the software delivers dynamic control of cooling in your data center.
The AI Engine serves as the brain of the Vigilent system. It’s where the mountain of data from the network of environmental sensors is aggregated and stored indefinitely. The engine then analyzes and processes that data to inform decisions about what to do next.
The high-performance engine is specifically designed and tuned to operate the specialized, patented control software at the heart of the Vigilent system. It’s designed to reside on your internal IP network, where it communicates with network managers, receives monitored data, and issues control commands. It’s designed for high reliability and high availability, and includes significant failsafes to ensure your facility is always protected.
