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.
Filo writes that the data center design will have an annualized average PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.1 or better. The company’s other facilities in Washington are powered by wind and hydroelectric sources. Outside air (or what the industry terms “free cooling”) is used for cooling most of the year, helping Yahoo to reduce energy consumption by 40% to 50%.
Search rival Google uses free cooling almost year round in its data center in Belgium, where the average summer temperature is between 66°F and 71°F (19°C and 22°C), writes Data Center Knowledge. That temperature range falls way below the 80°F (27°C) temperature that Google maintains for its data centers, adds Data Center Knowledge.
You’ll recall last week in this blog that our friend, Chuck Cahoon, solutions architect at CDW, recommended that the ambient temperature range in data centers should be between 68°F to 75°F (20°C to 24°C). Companies that have set the temperature higher than 75°F say they see savings spent on air conditioning as a result, according a separate Data Center Knowledge article. That article cites Mark Monroe of Sun Microsystems as saying that data centers can save 4% in energy costs for every increased degree in baseline temperature.
The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) in its 2008 ASHRAE Environmental Guidelines for Datacom Equipment expanded its recommended operating envelope. The low-end and high-end temperatures in its 2008 guidelines are 64.4°F (18°C) and 80.6° (27°C), respectively. This differs from its 2004 guidelines for low-end and high-end temperatures of 68°F and 77°F, respectively.
However, Data Center Knowledge warns that raising the temperature could leave companies with less time to recover from a cooling failure. Operating at a higher temperature should only be done by customers that have a high understanding of the cooling conditions in their facility, Data Center Knowledge adds.
The ASHRAE guidelines also note other issues for data centers operating at higher temperatures:
- Gains in energy efficiency could be offset by the data center equipment having to work harder to compensate for the higher inlet air temperatures.
- The higher temperatures could cause condensation on the refrigerated coils of refrigerated cooling systems, requiring data centers to humidify to replace the lost moisture in the air. (This is where humidity monitoring is essential.)
- Higher temperatures could result in noisier data centers.
For data centers operating at higher temperatures, environmental monitoring that encompasses temperature monitoring, humidity monitoring, and water leaks is key.
Related posts:
- Higher temperatures keep data centers cool for U.K.’s weather forecaster
- 5 tips for an energy-efficient data center
- Five major data center outages reported last week
- Temperature monitoring during the summer months
- The future of data center design