All Posts Tagged With: "Cooling"
I was reading an article about the recent Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) Data Center Energy Summit, in San Francisco, engineers and data center pros gathered to study 11 case studies on energy efficiency. The data center studies varied, but one green data center tactic stood out: hot-aisle/cold-aisle containment. The Hot Aisle readers know that data center [...]
A photograph from the BT Rochdale Data Center showing how the transparent curtains are attached to the roof. These curtains are used to separate the Hot Aisle from the Cold Aisle in order to drive up cooling capacity and efficiency. There are a number of articles about using Curtains to drive energy efficiency on The [...]
This is an interesting photograph of a commercially available APC Hot Aisle containment system. With adequate cold air to our raised floor, this rack module can house high density equipment.
ONStor Inc., recently announced the launch of their new Cougar 6000 series NAS gateway and claim: “Cougar’s advanced multi-core storage network processors are built into a highly available “cluster-in-a-box” design offering 18 cores per filer. This delivers high throughput, smallest footprint per rack unit, excellent power and cooling efficiency, and low cost per terabyte. This enables enterprises to process more [...]
HVAC Economizers (sometimes known as air-side Economizers) are useful for data centers which are located in regions of the world where the outdoor temperature is lower than the desired data center temperature (for at least some of the day or year) and the outdoor humidity is mild. Economizers save energy by cooling buildings with outside [...]
Dry coolers are used in many air cooled refrigeration systems. In case of low outdoor temperatures, outdoor air can be applied for cooling applications. In dry coolers, large fans create a forced airflow along air-to-water heat exchangers. Subsequently, the water circuit can be used for cooling of data centers, office buildings and industrial processes. Dry coolers play an important [...]
This is a picture of the corridor around the I.Net Data Center in Milan showing much of the M&E equipment that is normally housed within the data center hall located outside. So what are the benefits? Equipment can be maintained, filters changed etc.. without entering the raised floor area. Any heat load from the equipment [...]
I had two great questions from Hot Aisle readers following the latest article on Cold Aisle containment. Dan asked about the impact on fire suppression and Mark asked about where we got the transparent curtains. Lets start with the impact on fire systems of having either hot or cold aisle containment. The safety of personel [...]
I love this photograph that I took last year (2007) at the British Telecommunications Rochdale Data Center. It shows such a simple and easy to implement Green initiative that costs chump change and can take 15% off your electricity bill overnight. My colleague and friend Ged McLean of BT is that man who pulled it [...]
The London Financial Times published an interesting article about data center cooling. Written by fellow blgger Dan Ilet of Greenbang.com it focuses on the strain being put on data centers by increased numbers and power demand of servers and the rapid increase in the cost of electricity. Its often amusing what journalists pick up in [...]
It’s not a new phenomenon, Sun did it over a decade ago with the 4500 range of servers that vent hot air left to right rather than front to back but it doesn’t make it any easier to run a complex site when major vendors like Cisco continue to insist on breaking the front to back [...]
Milan has a high (and rising) water table and the city authorities encourage the use of groundwater for cooling. They want to keep the water level in check to protect subway lines and utilities. Groundwater is pumped through a heat exchanger for condenser water and then dumped to the sewer. The authorities pump out the [...]
The Hot Aisle reader, Mark Hatton of Trapdoor dropped me a mail a few days ago about a company based in Las Vegas called Switch Communications and the CEO, Rob Roy was making a lot of claims about how good their proposed new data center was. You can read the original article in The Register. [...]
I just read a neat article in Infoworld about Data Center energy efficiency, conspicuously the article does not talk about carbon footprint or greenhouse gasses, not once, it talks about the cost of energy and how stupid it is to waste money. It talks about using human ingenuity to solve the problem and for once it [...]
As we have been discussing CHP and Biomass Power Stations recently, I though that it might be interesting to explore this subject in more detail. I live in East Anglia in England, a largely agricultural area that is leading the way in Biomass electricity production, so this is a matter of local interest for me. [...]
The thing about data centers is just how much power they use. This one in Cardiff, Wales uses about 20MW of power and has huge strings of batteries storing power to drive the UPS units. The batteries are kept in dedicated battery rooms that are air conditioned to keep the cells cool and maintain a [...]
Data Centre Basics There are some basics that just need to be done to keep a data centre efficient and as green as possible. Maintaining the floor is often a task that is left too late. Gaps and unnecessary holes in the floor are bad news and lead to the mixing of hot and cold [...]
Separation of Hot and Cold Aisle The photograph above was taken in BT’s Rochdale Data Centre. It shows the use of curtains to separate the hot and cold aisles, thereby reducing the amount of hot air that mixes with cold air from the plenum floor and dramatically increasing cooling efficiency. Inside the curtained off space [...]
Cooling for Free (Almost) Fresh air cooled data centres simply draw fresh air from outside (via filters) and pump it under the plenum floor rather than the refrigerated and recycled air that is used in 20th Century Data Centres (see picture above). This approach can reduce the energy required to cool a site by 80% [...]
I have been working in the Data Centre business for many years and every time I take on a new role I get a surprise. A surprise that the basics are not done, that the lessons I learned all those years ago still haven’t reached this far! I guess that I should have stopped being [...]
Steve O’Donnell is CEO at S1NED where he is an analyst and consultant advising technology businesses on how best to go to market. He was a member of the Advisory Board for Salt Lake City Utah based Fusion-io (a maker of Solid State PCI based storage systems), he currently chairs both the advisory board for Mountain View [...]
