Server Rooms: Going Green and Saving Green – Part I
By Matt Newstrom, Senior Advisor
I was recently at the BetterBricks Award Breakfast, and the keynote speaker quoted a few statistics regarding energy usage that I had not heard before. According to the Department of Energy , data centers can consume up to 100 times more energy than a standard office building. Between 2000 and 2006, data center energy usage more than doubled, reaching more than 60 billion kilowatt hours per year. Through programs like LEED, the US Green Building Council has done a great job of educating the public and getting more commonly known statistics out to the masses. For example, in the US, buildings consume about 70% of all electricity usage and about 40% of all primary energy usage. Facts and figures like these are acting as a catalyst for changing people’s thinking, awareness, and practices. Whether the motivation for reducing energy usage is to impact the bottom-line fiscally or to save natural resources, either way, we see it as “doing the right thing.”
Now, while those figures are staggering, you may be asking yourself, “I’m a user of office space and don’t own or operate a data center, so what does this have to do with me?” Well, many of the operational practices and principles that data center operators such as Google, Intel, and HP are implementing in the way of energy conservation can be applied to users of office space. Most IT departments require supplemental cooling of their server rooms. The IT personnel calculate the heat load, how many tons of cooling is required to maintain the room at a specific temperature, and then install a CRAC (computer room air-conditioner) unit that will run 24/7/365. CresaPartners recently had the pleasure of partnering with a leader in energy conservation PECI on the leasing, planning, and project management of its new 60,000 SF office space. While PECI implemented many progressive energy conservation strategies into tenant improvements, the one that resonated most with me is the approach to the server room. We’ll be dissecting this approach by taking a closer look at four strategies:
Strategy One – Containing and Exhausting the Hot Air
PECI implemented the use of a “chimney cabinet” versus a more standard four-post rack or cabinet enclosure. The purpose of the chimney cabinet is to exhaust 100% of the heat created by the server equipment out of the back of the servers and into a return duct or directly to the outside. In PECI’s case, it took all of the hot air produced by the servers and ducted it through a coil that then pre-heats its domestic hot water, sends some of the excess heat down to the ground floor retail tenant, and then discharges it into the building’s return plenum. This accomplishes two things: 1) it takes away the heat load that would otherwise be expelled into the room, then costing the tenant to be cooled by supplemental means, and 2) it saves energy that would be required to heat the hot water for the kitchen and coffee bars and heat for the ground-floor tenant.
Strategy Two – Server Room Temperature Set-Point
Most of the corporations that I’ve worked with set their temperature set-point in their server room or telecom closet at 69-72 degrees. Typically, this will require some type of supplemental cooling system to maintain those temperatures, which most of the time must run around the clock. PECI has initially set its set-point for cooling at 85 degrees, with the goal of moving it to 90 degrees. While this may appear to be extreme, a number of studies show that show that running equipment in higher temperature ranges found “no consistent increase” in failure rates due to the greater variation in temperature. With that said, it is advised that you check with the equipment manufacturer to verify any specific warranty requirements associated with operating temperature being met.
Stay tuned for Part II of this series, where I will discuss the third and fourth strategies implemented by PECI.
Tags: corporate real estate, data center, energy conservation, green, server room, sustainable
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 at 7:00 am and is filed under Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Good strategies that can be easily implemented in any server room. For the “little guys” the costs of “greening” are often prohibitive. It’s nice to see some straightforward strategies that can be beneficial when used in small server rooms. Directing cooling to where it is needed and exhausting warm air where it is generated are two strategies we recommend for our clients when they use portable air conditioners to supplement building air in small server rooms. I’m not so sure about that 90 degree mark — the jury is still out on that figure.
I’ll be looking for part 2.