Cooling your data center is a breeze by tate cantrell

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Aug 12 2009) Power and Cooling

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   With today’s economy still trying to recover and new standards being set for green IT, it’s hard to justify spending millions of dollars and guzzling megawatts of electricity chilling data centers when you can cool it for free. According to predictions by The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, power costs for data centers could rise to as high as $7.4 billion a year by 2012 without efficiency improvements.  Data center owners and large companies are working to reduce their carbon footprint by removing internal air-conditioning and bringing in naturally cool outside air.
   
   Hewlett-Packard is diving into the idea of free cooling by placing its data center just off the North Sea coast in the United Kingdom.  In this location, cold sea air will keep servers chilled and in return cut the center’s cooling power needs in half.  Google is also cashing in on the benefits of free cooling by turning to Belgium - at least for most of the year.  On the few days that the weather in Belgium gets above the average of 71 degrees, Google will turn off its equipment and shift the computing load to other their other data centers located elsewhere.
   
   For companies that don’t have numerous data centers located across the globe, the alternative might be found in a cool place – Iceland.  With the average annual temperature in Iceland of 30°F in January and 55°F in July, data center campuses, like Verne Global, can take advantage of free cooling 365 days a year.  We put that cool air to use through highly efficient heat exchangers and as a result can handle a wide range of power densities from single server infrastructures that run at four to five kW per rack and on up to next generation blade servers with up to 15 to 20 kW per rack using cooling from Iceland's ambient temperature alone.
   
   This concept of environmentally cooling data centers will allow companies to reduce typical cooling costs by 80% or more; making costs savings, essentially, a breeze.  

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