Cooling Down By All Means by Doug Mohney

Entities Mentioned

• IBM
• Intel
• Syracuse University
• Doug Mohney

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   Cooling, represented by the loud and noisy air conditioning units, is a major factor in the electrical bill and in the amount of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere.  Reducing or even dumping the big blowers is becoming a major factor in data center design.

   IBM is working with Syracuse University and the State of New York to build a new computer data center for the University incorporating green features, reports CNET News. Among the more innovative features being rolled into the testbed/showcase facility is a liquid cooling system using double-effect absorption chillers to convert exhaust heat from the facility's microturbines into chilled water to cool the data center's servers; enough excess capacity is expected to be available to handle the needs of an adjacent building.  

   Other cooling bells and whistles include IBM's "cooling doors" on server racks that use chilled water to pull heat from each rack more efficiently than conventional room-chilling methods. Since it is IBM involved, distributed sensors will monitor server temperatures and usage to provide "smart grid" style adjustments to each cooling door.

   Intel conducted a more extreme experiment in New Mexico – not known for its gentle summer temperatures – to simply suck in air from the outside without controlling the humidity, dump it onto the racks, and flush the hot air out of the data center.  Over a ten month period, Intel saw no significant increase in server failures despite what it calls "considerable variations" in temperature and humidity, along with poor air quality. 

   Inbound air temperatures were allowed to go up to 90 degrees – wayyy above the standard 68 F used in a traditional data center – before a cooler kicked in to keep things from going

   Intel estimates that power savings of up to 67 percent are possible by using the "air economizer" method, representing estimated annual savings of $2.87 million in a 10 megawatt data center, but there are some interesting details in the fine print.  Intel used standard household air filters to pull out large particles from the incoming air, with fine dust able to pass through; the servers and the interior of the data center became covered in a layer of dust – you might get better performance if you vacuumed out the dust once in a while and there's no longer-term data as to what the dust might do to your servers.

   Humidity "changed rapidly" at times, running from 4 percent to 90 percent; it's fair to say that New Mexico's relatively low year-round humidity is a more friendly environment for data center equipment than a more humid climate such as Southern Florida for this type of approach.

   In addition, Intel believes that removing evaporative cooling using water towers as a pre-cooling stage could save up to 76 million gallons annual for a 10-MW data center. 

   
   

   
   

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