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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."
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.
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Is it really worth to be dependent on the weather in exchange for a lower energy bill?
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 have to back this up. TFA says the maximum temperature in Brussels is 66 to 71 degrees. I recall it being warmer than that during the summer I lived there. I can't quite remember the temperature, but 24 or 25 C (which is in the mid to upper 70s F) comes to mind.
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?
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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.
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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 ;)
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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This reminds me of a technique for cooling water in a desert which could tenably be applied to the data center as well.
Basically, a container is filled with water, closed/sealed, and wrapped with a damp/wet towel and buried in the ground (or just placed somewhere in the sun, I suppose). The evaporation of the moisture in the rag will draw the heat from the inside of the container, resulting in frigid water.
Put a data center on a dry coastal equatorial area and harness solar to desalinate the water. Build the data center under ground, with the roof of the center allowing easy flow of heat upwards, and then plant edible vegetation on top of the roof. Water the roof consistently to cool your data center during the day (and harvest the proceeds to sell/consume).
It may or may not be worth it financially, but it'd probably work.
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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.
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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?
There is a way to make ice in a dry environment by exposing water to the coolness of the night sky and insulating it during the day.
Bruce Perens.
max temp in the center of Belgium ever recorded was 38ÂC (and that's like 50 years ago). a very hot summer is a summer with a 15 day period with max temps above 30Âc.
(in the northern part of Belgium, you can get up to 40+ ÂC, but the Google datacenter is further down south.)
ÂC = degrees celsius (seems like it's not getting through properly for whatever reason)