Warm up your datacenter

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Rich Miller writing at Data Center Knowledge

The latest company to focus attention on temperature in the data center is Google. “The guidance we give to data center operators is to raise the thermostat,” said Erik Teetzel, an Energy Program Manager at Google. “Many data centers operate at 70 degrees or below. We’d recommend looking at going to 80 degrees.”

Jumping Jehoshaphat, that’s warm. We are well below 70 ourselves…

Data center managers can save 4 percent in energy costs for every degree of upward change in the set point, according to Mark Monroe of Sun Microsystems, who discussed data center set points at a conference last year.

The article covers different approaches and some of the downsides that balance the upside potential. Worth a read.

Intel recently conducted a 10-month test to evaluate the impact of using only outside air (also known as air-side economization) to cool a high-density data center in New Mexico, where the temperature ranged from 64 degrees to as high as 92 degrees. Intel said it found “no consistent increase” in failure rates due to the greater variation in temperature and humidity.

I’m hearing more and more HPC centers are trying this. Are you? What’s your experience? There are evidently real benefits

Comments

  1. Gaurav Agarwal says

    Hi,

    Read your article. Looks quite promising! I’m working with HSBC green team. I always thought how we could ‘extract/suck’ heat dissipated in datacenters-servers, make some better use of it such as in boiling water etc. By doing so less cooling will be required.

    Now, when I read your article it looks like it is doable. A few questions- is it possible to capture heat at the very beginig and route it some constructive use? What are the best ways to economically use cooling systems? What considerations need to be made while selecting a new cooling system or in tweaking the existing one? I can provide you with the details, if required.

    Your article talks about raising the ‘set-point’ but what I think more than that I would like to know how heat could be sucked directly and channalized to a sink.

    I understand the Vitualization and Cloud Computing concepts to achieve the same. But, is not what i’m looking at because it from technology point of view. What I’m looking for is efficient ways cool servers and to capture heat.

    Can you advise a Green/Energy consultant in India who could guide us in this?

    Could you please help?

    Best Regards,
    +91 9320960177