The New Cool Data Centers

The information technology industry is working on all fronts to better manage its intense consumption of energy.
This course is no longer active
[ Page 2 of 6 ]  previous page Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 next page
From GreenSource
Nancy Solomon

Furthermore, staff within data-centric companies typically worked in departmental silos: IT personnel focused on purchasing and running equipment to obtain the highest capacity and reliability for their customers, paying little heed to how their decisions were affecting the facility department's budget and the company's overall bottom line. According to Rumsey, the energy to power a conventional 10- to 20-megawatt commercial-grade data center could run $10 million to $20 million per year. Over five years—which is about the expected life span of IT equipment—this amounts to the cost of the hardware itself. “People are finally waking up,” says Rumsey. “The breakthrough came in the last three to five years, when IT staff finally listened to facility operators.”

Holistic Approach

Once the problem was acknowledged, the industry began seriously tackling it in a much more holistic way because it turns out every component and process—from power source and data management to mechanical systems—becomes fair game when trying to reduce energy consumption while maintaining the capacity and reliability on which customers increasingly depend.

Facebook’s LEED Gold data center in Prineville, Oregon, has an innovative cooling system to reduce overall energy use.

Photo © Jonnu Singleton Photography

And the reexamination has been intense in both the private and public sectors. Industry giants like Facebook and Yahoo! have reconceived their stand-alone data centers from the ground up. Building-standards organizations like the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) have established—and periodically revise—their recommendations for this building type, while IT-focused consortiums like the Green Grid and the Open Compute Project Foundation have sprung up to share ideas and disseminate best practices. Acknowledging the unique challenges of data centers, the U.S. Green Building Council has incorporated specific requirements for existing and new data centers as a separate building type in its current draft version of LEED v4. And both the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy have ramped up their programs on data-center efficiency.

Unique Program

The primary purpose of a data center is to house, operate, and maintain information-technology equipment. By and large, this equipment runs 24/7 year-round. In doing so, a conventional facility “can consume 100 to 200 times as much electricity [per square foot] as standard office spaces,” according to High Performance Data Centers, a design-guidelines sourcebook written by staff at Integral Group and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and published by Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) in January 2011.

Chart by David Foster

 

[ Page 2 of 6 ]  previous page Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 next page
Originally published in GreenSource
Originally published in September 2012

Notice

Academies