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Google's Chiller-Less Data Center
1sockchuck writes "Google has begun operating a data center in Belgium that has no chillers to support its cooling systems, which will improve energy efficiency but make weather forecasting a larger factor in its network management. With power use climbing, many data centers are using free cooling to reduce their reliance on power-hungry chillers. By foregoing chillers entirely, Google will need to reroute workloads if the weather in Belgium gets too warm. The facility also has its own water treatment plant so it doesn't need to use potable water from a local utility."
Guess they'll be in big trouble when global warming strikes Belgium!
If it wasn't for the required internet connectivity google could go off the grid completely. But they already own so much fibre and the public internet seems to need google more than they need it.
Soon they will generate all their own power from wind and solar, convert all their employees shit to power so they don't need the sewerage system either, send all their traffic through the network of low earth orbit satellites they are about to launch which also conveniently beam solar power back down to them.
So basically at the end of the day they will be able to buy or swindle a plot of land from some country with low tax, bring in all their own employees, contribute absolutely nothing to the local economy and leave when the sun goes down. It's great really, saves them on lawyers that would otherwise help them pussyfoot through the swaths of modern over-regulation and the satellites will help them get past any censorship / connectivity problems.
And if China start shooting down their satellites, Google will make satellites that shoot back
So basically everything gets rerouted on a hot day. Ok, that sounds fine until you realize that most of the outages of Google's products were due to, rerouting. And also, it seems odd that the cost of building a (hopefully redundant) datacenter that is this unreliable would be less than consolidating it with another one and using electrical cooling.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Why not go the extra mile and use recycled urine?
Is it really worth to be dependent on the weather in exchange for a lower energy bill?
Why not just reroute the weather? Once google gets into cloud seeding and all that they really will be SkyNet.
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I wonder if it would be feasible to have massive passive cooling (heat sinks, fans, exhausts from the data center, etc.) and run the data centers which are currently at night (i.e. on the dark side of the planet.) and constantly rotate the workload around the planet, to keep the hotest centers in the coolest part of the planet. The same logic could be applied moving workloads between the northern and southern hemispheres.
Yes, there would be tons more telecommunication to do, with the impacts on performance, data transmission costs and extra heat required to run all those routers at 120%, but there are fewer routers than servers, no?
I think Google needs to start investing some time and money into buying or building Nuclear Power Facilities.
It could pay off for them, because they certainly don't need all of the power they would generate, and could sell some back to the Country/State/Region they build it in.
Sounds like a win-win to me.
P.S. - Please don't start a flame war about how Nuclear Power is 'unclean' or 'dangerous' -- in today's society it is cleaner, more efficient and just as safe, if not safer, than coal-fired generators.
"The climate in Belgium will support free cooling almost year-round, according to Google engineers, with temperatures rising above the acceptable range for free cooling about seven days per year on average. The maximum temperature in Brussels during summer reaches 66 to 71 degrees, while Google maintains its data centers at temperatures above 80 degrees."
yep. it's never too hot in belgium. it's because the sun never shine here. Sky is always full of grey clouds and It's almost always raining. but hey... that's my country!
As the number of chiller-less data centers in the Northern Hemisphere increases, New Zealand may become the ideal location to build alternate climate data center capacity to deal with hot summers in Europe and Northern America... :)
Remember that even on hot days not all of the traffic through the datacenter needs to be rerouted, and I'd imagine that a location selected for a datacenter like this was chosen for the infrequency of days that will require rerouting. Do you know how much it costs to cool a datacenter, and how much this will save? I don't, but Google probably does, and they probably wouldn't make a decision to do something like this without comparing the savings with the potential cost from decreased lifespan of computers running hot and losses due to downtime. I would also imagine that Google will be working to greatly increase stability during rerouting, given the comments from the end of TFA about other power saving uses, such as routing traffic to datacenters where it's night, meaning "free cooling" can be used since it's colder outside, and off-peak electricity rates are in effect.
I think the concept is interesting, and it makes me wonder if we'll see more datacenters built in areas of the world more conducive to projects like this in the future.
But if your data center is in say, Minnesota, it seems like you could balance the temperature with outside air for many months out of the year. Obviously you'd need to light up the chillers in the summer, but running them 4 months out of the year seems like a huge energy savings than running them year round.
I remember visting Superior in the summer and the lake water was freezing f'ing cold even in June. Wonder if you could run a closed loop heat exchanger without screwing up the lake environment?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The ancient Persians had a passively cooled refrigerator called the yakhchal which "often contained a system of windcatchers that could easily bring temperatures inside the space down to frigid levels in summer days."
Perhaps the Google datacenter could employ some variation of their technique.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
So the fundamental upshot is that the point to point speed of the internet will be directly correlated to the average temperature of various cells, on a large scale. The statistical effect will be there. I'd wager this will be a remarkably accurate and near real-time barometer of global temperature.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
It's good to read some good news for a change...but it wont hit too many headlines..."Giant Googlebillion-dollar Company Doing Something Good" This "good" I speak of is someone with means and vision getting out there and just doing something. I still think Google could easily turn to the darkside...but is a whole different post ;)
COOL!
I'm not sure I understand why they constructed their own water treatment plant. I would think that it would be more energy efficient on the whole to use the already constructed municipal system in the area.
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Did anyone else think of weed when reading "chiller-less" and "Belgium"?
At two meters below grade the soil is a constant 50F/10C or so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump, etc.
As others have noted, that's plenty cool enough for most data centers.
Buy land in Greenland - now!
"I think the concept is interesting, and it makes me wonder if we'll see more datacenters built in areas of the world more conducive to projects like this in the future."
Already happening in a way. Check out EDS's Wynyard facility. They didn't eliminate the chillers entirely last I looked, but in that climate they could have if they trusted the outdoor conditions and local code officials (open cooling towers are subject to abrupt shutdown if there is a Legionella scare anywhere near by in Europe).
Although the lure of unutilized MW is a bigger pull. It's always nice to site a datacenter where the local utility overbuilt and isn't going to ream you when you ask for a MW or twenty.
That is where the ice storage systems become interesting and cost effective. In the states, usually half of a commercial energy bill is peak demand. If you can transfer that energy usage to night time to build up your ice storage and transfer your main power draw to off peak the savings can be very significant and create payback times in months not years.
I'm not not licking toads.
They could have used Alaska or N. Dakota instead and keep jobs in USA...
Why didn't they just build it in Maine?
Lots of cool weather and lots of cheap geo-thermal power.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I wonder how much this is a cynical marketing and public policy exercise. A few months ago, the European Commission announced an ambitous programme to the IT industry for European energy conservation targets to be met by 2012 and lo and behold, look who's here preening its feathers?
The worst part of global warming, for me personally, has been the unusual cold. I was living in Brazil during the summer that already finished there, and we didn't have a normal warm summer.
Last winter in the U.S. here, it was so cold and icy it was not safe to go downtown for several days.
Move datacenters to Antarctica.
An Enabler for "Follow the Moon"?
The ability to seamlessly shift workloads between data centers also creates intriguing long-term energy management possibilities, including a "follow the moon" strategy which takes advantage of lower costs for power and cooling during overnight hours. In this scenario, virtualized workloads are shifted across data centers in different time zones to capture savings from off-peak utility rates.
This approach has been discussed by cloud technologists Geva Perry and James Urquhart as a strategy for cloud computing providers with global data networks, who could offer a "follow-the-moon" service to enterprise customers who would normally build data centers where power is cheap. But this approach could also produce energy savings for a single company with a global network - someone like Google.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
UPS! Lost a couple of words there, putting that link in.
That last sentence should read:
As for placing datacenters beyond the arctic circle - my guess is that they are going to keep building their datacenters closer to the internet backbones for some time to come.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Why Belgium? Taxes are high (I think highest in Europe) and in summer it can get to +-30C. Why not a country more to the north of Europe where it is cooler and with less tax?
Why not just build them in the Arctic?
Or they can use Cloud Computing to predict cloud motion and therefore how to distribute work loads.
My sig is better than your sig.
Google will need to reroute workloads if the weather in Belgium gets too warm.
Ha ha ha ha oh ho ho ha ha. Seriously though, hello from Belgium.
I did read the PP and I've even replied to it.
And I thought that I was clear enough in my reply, but apparently not.
See... the game is not most power-efficient cooling, or even best cooling.
The game is "most bang per buck invested in the server infrastructure".
Now... Saving money by reducing the cooling costs by using huge passive cooling farms is a nice idea, but not as easily calculable as simply switching to cheaper electricity.
Sure, should you move your servers to Siberia you would get shitload of passive cooling, but unless polar bears are going to start using broadband internet - servers will never make it above 50% efficiency.
Cause, even on 100% usage - they will still be in the middle of the f-in desert. No local traffic. Too far from civilization for the global traffic.
Any money you would save by running those "virtualized workloads" through such power-efficient servers would be overshadowed by higher maintenance costs to the infrastructure and higher energy costs.
On the other hand - switching to servers running on cheaper electricity at the moment is a quite clear and easily calculable way to save money.
There is a compromise solution though. Mountains. Don't go north, go up.
Granted, there are not always readily available, but Europe and USA's west coast are really close to both major internet backbones and mountains.
Still... You would probably save more by "zone switching" than with passive cooling.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Ice storage does not work very well for datacenters. Cooling load does not drop significantly at night during the peak week, so you end up having to install significantly more chillers than a normal system to charge the ice bank. Datacenters are usually limited by the MW they can get from the utility, and you don't want to waste an extra 500 kW just on extra connected chiller load to make ice at night. That's watts out of your IT equipment. And ice is much more inefficient to make than just cooling the space directly - a 20F brine is inherently less efficient to produce than 50F chilled water.
Why don't they build a data-center in Quebec province? They could build it near the James Bay and have a lof of cool weather plus having really cheap electricity. All they would have to do is build a backbone of fiber to it, which is inland :)