INTELLIGENT GREEN TECHNOLOGY
How datacentres can control
their cooling costs
Allowing the ambient temperature to increase and usage of economisers is debated by
Damien Wells, Kevin Brown, Jeff St Clair at Schneider Electric. Excerpts.
T
he datacentre industry is poised for
significant change in the refrigerants
which are used in cooling systems,
changes that you would do well to pay
attention to in order to understand the
implications for your own datacentre.
Datacentre operators are being
encouraged to organise their facilities so
that they can run at higher temperatures.
The theory is that higher operating
temperatures improve overall datacentre
efficiency by reducing the cooling effort
needed, leading to reduced loads on fans
and chillers and permitting more free
cooling hours.
However, there are many factors to
consider before you go ahead and raise
40
cooling inlet temperatures. In general,
we are reaching the point of diminishing
returns on some of these temperature-
control strategies because a datacentre is
a very complex system. When you start
raising temperatures some things actually
consume more energy. You might save some
energy by not running the compressor,
for example, but then the IT server fans
might ramp up and they will consume more
energy. You really need to model that out
and see what are the trade-offs.
Your strategy will also have to take
into account where you are in the world
because climate is an important factor.
The bigger context at the end of the
day is how much of an improvement are
we really making especially with regard
to what we need to be doing into the
future. Challenges are going to increase
because there are going to be more and
more datacentres as society needs more
compute power. That growth in demand
is not going to stop. Governments will
become concerned about how effectively
the industry is using its energy and things
like raising temperatures are not going to
get us to where we will need to be.
We are moving into an area where we
will be taking care not to oversize the
amount of IT needed to run a particular
application. Hopefully, that will help with
energy efficiency and at the same time as we
do that we can start designing the physical
Issue 05
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS