DATA CENTRES
A closer look at data centre heat
According to recent estimates , data centres use some three per cent of the world ’ s entire electricity supply , whilst producing some two per cent of all CO2 emissions , says Oli Barrington , managing director , UK and Ireland , at R & M .
Regulators and other stakeholders are calling for data centres to use energy in more environmentally sound ways .
However , at the same time , data hungry technology solutions are expanding rapidly and requirements are growing . High density , of more than 100 ports per rack unit , is essential . How do you balance increased demand with lower energy consumption and keep temperatures down ?
Data centre energy efficiency is usually measured in ‘ Power Usage Effectiveness ’, or PUE . If all the energy going into the data centre were used exclusively for IT , the PUE would be ‘ 1 ’. A PUE of 2 means that for every watt of power used for computing , another watt is consumed for power distribution , lighting , heating , security systems and , of course , cooling and related processes . Using more energy efficient hardware , advanced monitoring and convergence can all play a part in lowering PUE . Google , for example applied its own DeepMind machine learning to successfully reduce the amount of energy used for cooling in its data centres by up to 40 per cent .
New approaches to cooling
Adapting and optimising cooling systems has always been one of the main ways of improving data centre energy performance . Cooling is essential as higher
22 | March 2017