UNCOVERING THE LAYERS
Green Grid Free Cooling Map – EU.
Courtesy of Green Grid.
provide a real opportunity to deliver data
centre operations requiring no mechanical
cooling, across many geographic locations
around the world.
1. The data centre uses less absorbed
power dedicated to cooling and
reduces energy costs
2.
As the air inlet
temperature increases
so does the free-cooling
opportunity and when applied
innovatively with appropriate
cooling technologies can
eliminate the need for
mechanical refrigeration.
IT equipment manufacturers in
specific applications even allow
for specified time excursions
to environmental temperatures
up to 45 o C, without affecting
the manufacturer’s warranty. In real-
life environments, the primary factor
Data centres live or die based on their up-
time and availability, therefore equipment
reliability is paramount. Working with
ASHRAE TC9.9 guidelines, servers, storage
and networking manufacturers have for
some time been engineering their devices
and equipment to perform across the full
‘Recommendation’ range.
Extending into the wider ‘Allowable’
environmental range allows IT equipment
to operate more efficiency, and gains from
two outcomes:
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
(Graph 1) – ASHRAE TC9.9 Environmental
Classes. Courtesy of ASHRAE.
determining system failure rate is
component temperature. Equipment
improvements now in place provide high
reliability and a reduction in the risk of
device thermal shutdown, which has
caused major data centre outages during
the past few years.
Delivering lower server inlet temperatures
usually requires large, complex, expensive
equipment and cooling infrastructure.
The more equipment on-site, the greater
the overall complexity and the lower the
reliability is likely to be. All equipment
requires maintenance and servicing and it
is sensible to assume at some point during
the lifecycle it will fail. Furthermore, energy
is the biggest Op-Ex for a data centre and
mechanical cooling represents the largest
proportion of energy use,
beyond the IT load.
Therefore, this represents
the greatest opportunity
for energy and cost
savings. Correspondingly,
reducing the energy used
within the data centre
infrastructure effectively
releases that capacity
for more IT utilisation.
Reducing complexity
is a critical approach
to efficiency and
sustainability, achieving
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