Richard Barrington, chief sustainability officer at
Iceotope
Increasing demands of a growing population coupled with
energy intensive lifestyles leads to major challenges for those who source,
produce, distribute and consume energy.
The UK is not immune to this challenge -indeed many
projections suggest demand for energy will outstrip supply as early as
2015,with service interruptions affecting electricity supply soon after.
This has major implications for the data centre industry,
which within a developed nation such as the UK, accounts for more than ten
percent of all energy consumed, and is equal to more than 6,000,000 households
and growing. Given that in some data centres more than two thirds of the energy
is used for cooling, and in almost all cases the heat generated by the ICT is
treated as waste, fundamental changes need to be made.
A number of industry initiatives have attempted to tackle
this problem and develop best practice, for example the Green Grid or the EU
Code of Conduct, but these guidelines are all predicated on the current
paradigm of blowing chilled air on hot electronics, with some forays into using
‘outside air ’,sometimes known as ‘free air cooling ’ ((climate and ambient
temperature permitting).This system still treats the heat as waste, rather than
a potential resource, and still requires large amounts of supplementary
equipment.
However, there are alternatives available now which
address these concerns. Relocating data centres to the Arctic Circle is
becoming a popular choice for many businesses but may not be feasible for those
with regulatory concerns or geographical restrictions. Next generation liquid
cooling, on the other hand, negates the need for such a move and provides free
cooling regardless of location.
Liquids are known to be up to 4,000 times more efficient
at capturing and transferring heat than air, using much less energy to do so.
However, adoption of liquid cooling has been patchy at best, either seen as a
high end solution in super computer environments or as a bolt on within
existing facilities.
The reality is that the current generation of liquid
cooling has failed to gain mass market acceptance because it has not been
designed with the current operational requirements of the data centre in mind,
that is modular, scalable, highly available, fully redundant and safe -until
now.
A new blueprint
Rather than tweaking or re-engineering existing systems,
disruptive technologies are transforming the entire data centre industry with
wholesale changes at even the most basic level.
In the current design process, consideration must be made
for a variety of supplementary systems as well as the core IT servers. For
instance, traditional facilities require chiller equipment, heat removal (and
disposal)systems and separate heating apparatus. Even where free air cooling is
possible for a percentage of the time, a complex and expensive Computer Room
Air Conditioning (CRAC) infrastructure is still required.
In contrast, next generation liquid cooling systems, like
those established by Iceotope, completely remove the need for chiller equipment
or CRAC -freeing up large amounts of space and reducing the energy required to
cool ICT by 97%.This also improves data centre density and means that the
equipment used runs silently, enabling systems to be positioned inside busy
populated locations such as research facilities with no detrimental effects.
The flexibility of such spaces is vastly increased and
there is less requirement for large, custom built structures. This solution
also means that the heat harvested from the system may be used in the heating
of local buildings, not only reducing the environmental footprint of the IT
facility itself, but also of other facilities able to make use of the heat.
By making use of an environmentally sound inert
coolant,3M Novec, Iceotope ’s system is not only capable of reducing cooling
power costs, but allows data centres to run neutral in terms of heat. The
Iceotope Platform operates with facilities input temperatures of up to 45 °C,
conforming to The American Society of Heating Refrigerating and
Air-Conditioning Engineers standards (ASHRAE)as ‘W4 ’,the optimum temperature
for liquid cooling. This temperature is key to providing free cooling anywhere
on the planet, as the capability of taking such high input temperatures, whilst
still being able to keep electronics cool, makes this system capable of
functioning in even the most severe
conditions. In countries that experience extreme temperatures or even in
equatorial and desert regions, where heat is always a major concern for compute
environments,next generation liquid cooling is able to resolve such problems
and still provide 24/7 free cooling.
The next generation liquid cooling described in this
article is set to disrupt the economics of the data centre industry in a major
way. Given the potential energy and cost savings, this technology is not just
innovative, it could force the market to rethink data centres all together.
30 July 2012
Connecting Industry
