Power usage effectiveness has been an important metric in the data center world for some time now. Companies running data center facilities typically strive for the lowest PUE they can achieve in order to reduce their operating costs and promote their green environmental credentials.
In an earlier article, my colleague Srikanth Murugan demonstrated how to cut through the marketing hype of competing claims about PUE performance. I would now like to take the subject a little further and focus on the economics of PUE and how data center vendors and operators can maximize their facilities’ performance.
Selecting the ideal location
Stable power grids, low energy prices and year-round access to “free cooling” drove a number of large Internet companies to build data centers in the Nordics where conventional wisdom dictated they could most easily achieve extremely low PUE values. Google in Finland and Facebook at The Node Pole in Sweden are two such examples. However, increasingly relaxed data center temperature and humidity ranges – as defined by ASHRAE – have now made low PUE deployments possible for a much wider range of geographical locations.
Cooling developments
A key area of technical development here are evaporative indirect free air cooling systems, now available from an increasing number of cooling technology suppliers. Using an evaporative cooler, dry outside air of 32 degrees can still be used to cool down air in the data center to 22 degrees, thus delivering meaningful savings from reduced electricity needed for powered cooling.
Even more exiting from an economic perspective is that for some locations this enables the use of outside air for cooling all year round, resulting in a lower maximum PUE and bringing significant capital expenditure savings.
Read More: http://www.rcrwireless.com/20151208/opinion/reality-check-the-economics-of-data-center-power-usage-effectiveness-tag10
In an earlier article, my colleague Srikanth Murugan demonstrated how to cut through the marketing hype of competing claims about PUE performance. I would now like to take the subject a little further and focus on the economics of PUE and how data center vendors and operators can maximize their facilities’ performance.
Selecting the ideal location
Stable power grids, low energy prices and year-round access to “free cooling” drove a number of large Internet companies to build data centers in the Nordics where conventional wisdom dictated they could most easily achieve extremely low PUE values. Google in Finland and Facebook at The Node Pole in Sweden are two such examples. However, increasingly relaxed data center temperature and humidity ranges – as defined by ASHRAE – have now made low PUE deployments possible for a much wider range of geographical locations.
Cooling developments
A key area of technical development here are evaporative indirect free air cooling systems, now available from an increasing number of cooling technology suppliers. Using an evaporative cooler, dry outside air of 32 degrees can still be used to cool down air in the data center to 22 degrees, thus delivering meaningful savings from reduced electricity needed for powered cooling.
Even more exiting from an economic perspective is that for some locations this enables the use of outside air for cooling all year round, resulting in a lower maximum PUE and bringing significant capital expenditure savings.
Read More: http://www.rcrwireless.com/20151208/opinion/reality-check-the-economics-of-data-center-power-usage-effectiveness-tag10
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