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Intel Shows Data Centers Can Get By (Mostly) With Little AC
Ted Samson IW writes "InfoWorld reports on an experiment in air economization, aka 'free cooling,' conducted by Intel. For 10 months, the chipmaker had 500 production servers, working at 90 percent utilization, cooled almost exclusively by outside air at a facility in New Mexico. Only when the temperature exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit did they crank on some artificial air conditioning. Intel did very little to address air-born contaminants and dust, and nothing at all to deal with fluctuating humidity. The result: a slightly higher failure rate — around 0.6 percent more — among the air-cooled servers compared to those in the company's main datacenter — and a potential savings of $2.87 million per year in a 10MW datacenter using free cooling over traditional cooling."
How about reducing the need for AC POWER as well by cutting down on the number of AC TO DC PSU's.
Makes sense to me. The most efficent places to store data centers is in the northern US or Canada where you have sub-zero temperatures from November - March and ranging between 0-15 in April/May and Sept/Oct and the rest of the year 20-30+ (Celcius of course) With these lower temperatures they could run a data center entirely off outside air from September - May each year. Put a heppa filter in between to scrub out dirt and dust and vola, o'natural cooling solutions
Well, it makes sense. Normal PCs run on essentially ambient air, and live for years even under heavy loads (games put a lot of load on systems) despite all the dust and cruft. Servers aren't that different in their hardware, so it makes sense they'd behave similarly. And there's a lot that can be done cheaply to reduce the problems that were seen. Dust, for instance. You can filter and scrub dust from the incoming air a lot cheaper than running a full-on AC system. In fact the DX system used on the one side of the test probably scrubbed the incoming air itself, which would explain the lower failure rate there. Reduce the dust, you reduce the build-up of the thermal-insulating layer on the equipment and keep cooling effectiveness from degrading. Humidity control can also be done cheaper than full-on AC, and wouldn't have to be complete. I don't think you'd need to hold humidity steady within tight parameters, just keep the maximum from going above say 50% and the minimum from going below 5%. Again I'll bet the DX system did just that automatically. I'd bet you could remove the sources of probably 80% of the extra failures on the free-cooling side while keeping 90% of the cost savings in the process.
I will rephrase your question. Would a .6% increase in the already tiny failure risk be noticeable to someone running a single server when their chances of failure were already so small to begin with that their server was far less likely to fail in the first place?
No, so yes, it is worth it from a cost perspective. They can take the money they save and replace the hardware twice as fast and their already small failure rate is less than half. This is a win all around and actually, the article never said what was the source of the increased failures, heat or particulate in the air. If the latter, this is a huge win for energy efficiency.
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You lose on density, though. Aisle space in front of the racks is fixed, you need a certain amount for humans to move in. Shallow, tall equipment means fewer units per rack. With a current-format rack you need say a 3'-deep area for the rack and a 3'-wide aisle for access. That's 50% equipment and 50% access. If the racks were only 1' deep instead, you'd be using 25% for equipment and 75% for access (since you still need that 3' wide aisle). And in that 25% of space for equipment you now get perhaps 25% of the amount of equipment since each one's using 4x more vertical space in the rack and rack height can't change (it's limited by basically how high off the floor a human can reach to get to the equipment).
To make up for that, you need more square footage of data center to hold the equipment. That increases operating costs, which is what we're trying to reduce.