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."

Comments

Re:Unreliable...Probably not

[Banzai042]

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.

Re:Worth the tradeoff?

[symbolset]

If you're Google? Apparently the answer is "yes."

More people can and should do this. 27C is plenty cool enough for servers. It annoys me to go into a nipple crinkling datacenter knowing they're burning more juice cooling the darned thing than they are crunching the numbers. A simple exhaust fan and some air filters would be fine almost all of the time, and would be less prone to failure.