What Does CFD Really Cost a Data Center Engineering Firm?

It’s been a hard year to predict anything in the data center world. Public opposition is growing, states and cities are pausing new projects, and a job you were counting on can disappear after a single county meeting. For engineering firms that design these mission critical facilities, next year’s workload is anyone’s guess.

That uncertainty puts a spotlight on one cost most firms rarely examine: computational fluid dynamics, or CFD. These are the computer simulations that show how air and heat move through a data center and around the site. Most large cloud companies that run these facilities now require them on nearly every project.

Many firms handle CFD by keeping a dedicated engineer on staff, along with the software and computers required to run the simulations. That cost stays the same whether the firm delivers four studies a year or sixteen. In a slow year, the firm pays a full salary for an engineer without enough CFD work to fill their time, and the loss hides in overhead. In a busy year, there can be more work than one engineer can handle, so studies fall behind schedule, and that engineer ends up working nights and weekends to catch up.

At Resolved Analytics, so much of our CFD work is for data centers that we wanted to put real numbers on this. The result is a short white paper, Data Center Volume Swings. Your CFD Cost Does Not.

What’s inside:

• The break-even point. How many CFD studies a year a firm needs before an in-house CFD engineer pays for themselves.

• The cost of redoing studies. What it costs when a design change forces a new simulation on a fixed-fee project, and how some firms are handling it without going back to the client.

• The effect on firm value. What turning a fixed cost into one that rises and falls with the work can do to a firm’s earnings and value.

• What happens to your engineer. Why outsourcing CFD is a new assignment for your engineer, not a layoff.

• A simple formula to calculate your own break-even point in two lines.

Whether you lead an engineering firm or manage the budget for data center projects, this paper will help you see what your CFD work is really costing.

Fill out the form below to download the free white paper.