Yahoo powers data center using Niagara Falls; Google raises data center temperatures
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, humidity monitoring, temperature monitoring
If I received an invitation to visit the offices of Google and Yahoo, I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time snooping 
around the desk of the company founders. I’d rather spend my time checking out their data centers. Just imagine being among the machines that crunch all that search and email data zipping around the world. Just imagine what the physical security must be like at their data centers…
Yahoo last month announced plans to build its greenest data center in Lockport, N.Y. Yahoo co-founder and Chief Yahoo David Filo explains in his blog that the data center will be designed to use 100% outside air to cool the servers. And the resource used to power the data center and the servers will be the renewable hydroelectric power from the Niagara Falls. Read more
Could automobile traffic power green data centers?
Who knew that a drive to the grocery store could help save the planet.
UK grocery chain Sainsbury’s said it is the first European company to install kinetic road plates in one of its parking lots that produce energy every time a car drives over it. The kinetic road plates are expected to produce 30 kilowatts of energy an hour. 
When a car drives over the plates in any direction, a rocking motion is created under the road surface that turn generators. The energy is captured and redirected back to the store and used as power for the checkouts and other purposes, the grocer explains. The company says the power would normally have been taken from the National Grid.
The plates have been installed at Sainsbury’s newest store in Gloucester, England, which opened in June and sports many other environmental features. The company says the store will harvest enough rainwater over the next two years to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool and will be used to flush the toilets. Solar thermal panels heat up to 100% of the store’s hot water during the summer (yes, Britain does get plenty warm on some days in the summer), while the electric lights are on automatic dimmers so less electricity is used on brighter days.
The kinetic road plates are the brainchild of British designer Peter Hughes, who formerly advised the United Nations on renewable energy. The plates have also caught the attention of some local councils which are using the plates in speed bumps on roads to power street lights, traffic lights and road signs.
The idea hasn’t won over everyone, though. David MacKay, a professor in the department of physics at the University of Cambridge writes that the emissions saved is miniscule compared to the energy used by a typical trip to the grocery store. In an article for the Guardian newspaper, MacKay writes:
“For a car weighing one tonne travelling at 20mph when it hits the road plates, the extracted energy comes to 0.002 kilowatt-hours (kWh). Now, the energy used by the car, assuming it is driven three miles to and three miles from the supermarket with a fuel efficiency of 33 miles per gallon, is about 8 kWh. The savings from parking at the green car park thus amount to one four-thousandth of the energy used by the trip to the supermarket.”
The kinetic road plates idea isn’t the first time that people-generated power is being used to provide energy. Bar Surya, a London nightclub powers its lights and air conditioning using energy created by patrons pounding on the dance floor, while gyms use energy from people working out to power lights.
Coming back to the kinetic plates, there may not be enough auto or human traffic in your company’s parking lot or data center to help make enough power to run your data center, but just imagine how much energy could be generated from the traffic at your closest freeway.
Water cooling in data centers: Is it a good idea?
IBM says the water cooling technology used in its supercomputers could be a feature in all servers by 2019. 
According an IBM executive speaking at a recent data center conference in London, U.K., liquid-cooling could be “universal” in 10 years, reports eWeek Europe.
IBM removes heat in its Power575 supercomputers by placing water-chilled copper plates above the microprocessors. Big Blue says the result is that customers need 80% fewer air conditioning units and reduces the energy for cooling a data center by 40%. IBM scientists says water is up to 4,000-times more effective than air in cooling computer systems. The scientists are now working on embedding water cooling technology on a chip. When the water is at its hottest, it is syphoned off the chip to be used in heating a building or for hot water (perhaps to make coffee?).
HP also uses water cooling technology for its high-end servers but the company is also investing in what it calls its Smart Cooling technology, which dynamically allocates cooling resources to where and when they’re needed most. According to HP, Smart Cooling dynamically apportions air conditioning by measuring temperature distribution throughout a data center. HP said the technology helped it cut 25% off cooling costs in its own data centers.
Sun too uses water cooling in its High Performance Computing (HPC) family. Called the Sun Cooling Door technology, customers have a choice of either using chilled water or refrigerant gas. With chilled water, heat is removed by using chilled water from any source that can maintain a controlled temperature and flow rate. Sun describes its refrigerant gas option as a “rear-door passive design” that uses refrigerant gas coolant.
However, Sun’s own blogger Valdis Filks, is no fan of water cooling technology–specifically water cooling CPUs. In a blog post last year, Filks wrote: “We are just making computers so much more difficult to manage by adding water cooling within servers.” Filks gives four problems with water cooling within computers:
1) Complexity (need water in addition to all other cabling within datacenter)
2) Extra costs (any addition to electicity water cooling requires additional power in a datacenter, which adds costs)
3) Safety (water and electricity are a dangerous mixture, always a risk of water leaks)
4) Increase management (need a whole extra water cooling infrastructure and pipework)
Filks adds:
“A green datacenter should not have water cooled computers. Anyone using this water cooling to heat the building is adding immense complexity. What happens when we kick out the water cooled computer, do people in the building freeze. If we have a water pipe leakage do we have to swith off the water cooled computer while the rest of the air cooled computers continue running. Water cooling computers just have too many downsides and add so much more complexity. We can make life more simple by avoiding water cooled servers and using air cooled systems.”
While some critics say water and electronics don’t mix, you’ll be happy to know that Ravica SensorProbes monitor water leaks, as well as the temperature, humidy, voltage, smoke and security in data centers.
Higher temperatures keep data centers cool for U.K.’s weather forecaster
The U.K. government’s Meterological Office (Met Office) wants to increase the temperature of some of its data centers, according to a report in eWeek Europe. While it’s traditional to keep data centers cool, the Met Office wants to move out some of its more temperature-sensitive machines, such as tape drives, presumably so that it would enable it to be more efficient at keeping the temperature for the rest of its equipment on an even keel.
The government agency is using its modeling know-how to model the airflow around servers in its data centers to help it locate hot- and cool-spots. The knowledge would enable it to better distribute equipment, according to the article.
As InsideHPC points out, the move is similar to efforts deployed by Argonne National Laboratory’s Leadership Computing Facility. The agency shaved $25,000 a month off its electricity bill by using Illinois’ cold temperatures to chill the water to cool its systems.
Jeff Sims, ALCF project manager told HPCwire: “The trick is to find the warmest chilled water temperature you can live with at a given machine load, thus reducing the electric load on the chillers and maximizing the free cooling period.”
As part of the Met Office’s overhaul of its high-performance computing systems in the next 18 months, the agency also plans to use direct current (DC) instead of alternating current (AC) in its servers to “avoid the large losses of power during conversion from AC to DC,” according to eWeek. It quotes Met Office IT chief Steve Foreman as saying:
“We take the power off the mains, put it through the UPS so it is goes to DC, convert it back to AC,step it up, step it down, move it around a bit, and then we take it down into the machines for the current required … We are asking suppliers if there is any way we can reduce all that power loss so that we can just take DC out of the UPS [Uninterruptible Power Supply] and straight into the machines. We reckon we could save about 5% of our power use just by doing that and taking out those losses.”
Scientists find a way to generate electricity through vibrations
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, Intelligent Sensors
Scientists have discovered how to make electricity by converting low-frequency vibrations, like simple body movements, the beating of the heart or movement of the wind into energy. The discovery could enable you to charge your iPod or BlackBerry with a wave of your hand. According to researchers at the School of Material Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the findings could also be used for environmental monitoring.
The vibrations from movement is converted into electricity using zinc oxide nanowires. The nanowires generate an electric current when subjected to mechanical stress, according to the American Chemical Society. The researchers presented their findings at the ACS’s annual meeting in March.
The nanowires can be grown on a wide range of surfaces including metals, ceramics, polymers and fabrics.
The researchers believe the discovery could be used by the military to generate electricity for sensors and communication devices when they are far from energy sources, but what is the application for environmental monitoring?
For our purposes, we monitor the environment to ensure that it remains the same so that equipment is not adversely affected by a dramatic change in temperature, for example. In theory, we could use the nanowires to convert the ambient vibrations of the room into electricity and use that to charge the monitoring equipment. Or perhaps set a threshold for the ambient vibrations so that a change in the environment would kick the nanowires to turning on an alarming device.
The nanowires reminded me of metal whiskers or zinc whiskers, a data center manager’s worst enemy. They’re tiny hairs that grow spontaneously on metal surfaces and can cause short circuits. According to Wikipedia, zinc whiskers have been responsible for increased systems failure rates in computer server rooms. They can grow underneath zinc electroplated floor tiles used in raised floors due to the friction when they’re walked on. They can break off disk drives causing head crashes or bearing failures.
They’re a data center manager’s worst nightmare because zinc whiskers wouldn’t be the first thing that would spring to mind when faced with a systems crash in the server room.
5 tips for an energy-efficient data center
Designing a data center is much like designing a nursery for a newborn baby. You want your pride and joy to be happy and thrive in a room that’s not too cold, not too warm, and have the correct humidity. Below are five top tips to a happy data center. The tips are taken from the Green Grid‘s recently released whitepaper Fundamentals of data center power and cooling efficiency zones.
1. Blowing hot and cold: Having parallel rows of equipment racks facing forward may look neat and tidy but it could make a sauna out of your data center. IT equipment sucks in cool air via the front and pushes out hot air from the back. If a machine is spewing out hot air the device behind it is sucking that in when it should be taking in cold air. Imagine how hot the air must be in the last row of machines. The ideal placement for rows of equipment would be to have the front of the servers facing each other. The backs of the rows should also be facing each other to create a hot aisle/cold aisle configuration.
2. Place cables overhead: If the space underneath the raised floor is a spaghetti junction of cables cool air won’t be able to do its job in the data center. Cables should be distributed overhead and unused raised floor cutouts should be blocked to eliminate unwanted air leakage. The Green Grid recommends that perforated tiles, with a design of about 25% open area, should be used to ensure uniform and predictable airflow distribution in lower density areas.
3. Recommended temperatures: The recommended range of temperature for critical enterprise server and storage environments is between 64.4° to 80.6° F (18° to 27° C), according to the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), as cited in the whitepaper. ASHRAE also specifies a dew point value of about 5.5° C (41.9° F).
4. Set air conditioners to the same levels: Computer room air conditioning units with humidifiers are a great addition to ensure optimum humidity of the data center but if you have more than one, be sure that they are set to the same settings. If not, they could be operating at odds with one dehumidifying the air while the other is humidifying it.
5. Cool the source. The white paper recommends using row and rack-based cooling to address dynamic hot spots that can form as workloads are constantly shifted from one server to another. Cool air has a much shorter path of distribution, so bringing cooling closer to the heat source is key.