Is an environmentally sustainable data center possible?
One of the biggest concerns for IT facility managers is monitoring the temperature in data centers and server rooms to make sure that the excessive heat produced by hardware is not accumulating to dangerous levels that can overheat the servers. This is an important task for the obvious reason that overheated equipment can lead to expensive hardware damage and loss of data. However, conventional HVAC systems that use chilled forced air to cool data centers are highly inefficient with regards to energy consumption and therefore indirectly effect CO2 emissions. Being a bit of a green building geek, I looked up some examples of data centers that are using new (and old) technology for lower impact cooling. The first is HP’s wind-cooled Wynyard that open earlier this month. The 360,000 square foot data center, located on the Northeast coast of England, uses the frigid North Sea air to chill the air entering the server rooms through the forced air system. Initial testing indicates that the wind-cooled data center is 60% more energy efficient than conventional data centers. It’s the high-tech version of opening a window.
The second super-“cool” system out there is technology being developed by IBM for a zero-emission data center. The IBM system uses a cold-water circulating system under the floor of the data center. Because water is such an excellent coolant—capturing heat 4,000 times more efficiently than air—the system acts as a heat sink and literally sucks the excess heat out of the server racks. An added benefit of the water-cooled system is the ability to transfer the heat removed from the data center to other parts of the building, like administrative offices or lobbies, and use it to heat those spaces with very little energy consumption. The data center essentially serves as a hot water heater for the rest of the building!
From these two examples, it’s clear that there are options out there for designing sustainable HVAC systems that can meet the massive demand for cooling in data centers and server rooms. There is still a long way to go for data centers to be completely environmentally sustainable, but the industry is moving in leaps and bounds in that direction.
~JessicaFollow Me on Twitter
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