New tool launched to help data centres improve energy efficiency
Peta Hodge
6th October 2009
A new online tool has been developed to help stop data centres wasting energy and money – simply by taking more advantage of the cool air outside their buildings.
Cutting air conditioning or precision cooling costs is a real issue for data centres as they often exceed the costs of running the equipment by a considerable margin.
The new tool, which is free to use, is designed to help data centre and facilities managers determine how often the air outside their data centres is cooler than the air inside, and so how much so-called ‘free cooling’ is available to them.
The tool contains information from 608 weather stations throughout Europe and provides data for 33 European countries including the UK, down to city level.
It has been designed to allow data centre managers to input their specific variables – such as local energy costs, IT load, and facility load, as well as their particular location – to determine the potential energy savings for their individual facility.
The Green Grid – the global consortium of companies, government agencies and educational institutions that has developed the tool – claims a one megawatt data centre in Luton, with power at a cost of 13.6 cents per kilowatt (kW) hour, could save €340,000 (£314,500) a year using free cooling.
“For much of the year, the air outside data centres can be cooler than the air inside,” explained Vic Smith, Dell representative and EMEA technical work group chair of The Green Grid. “This tool that The Green Grid has developed will help determine how much free cooling a specific data centre can leverage.”
As well as indicating how much cooling is available from outside air, the tool provides information about savings that could be obtained using water-side economisers.
The same one megawatt (1000kW) data centre in Luton could save €210,000 (£194,000) per year using a water-side economiser, the Green Grid estimates.
“Data centres with increasing IT loads require more power to cool them, so finding cooling options that use less power is critical not only for organisations that don’t have resources to build new facilities but also for those that want to save money,” said Smith.
Admitting that most large data centres will already be aware of the advantages of maximising free cooling, he nevertheless said: “For most of the UK you could almost halve the electricity for data centres – and it’s not a one-off, it’s every year.
“What might be the biggest driver [of interest in the tool] is the Carbon Reduction Commitment, where companies will want to make savings [on energy usage],” he suggested.
Members of The Green Grid – whose purpose is to advance energy efficiency in data centres and business computing ecosystems – will have access to a high resolution graphical map of the estimated hours of air-side and water-side ‘economisation’ possible for Europe and other countries. Lower resolution maps of European free cooling estimates are available to others at The Green Grid website.