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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."
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.
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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 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.
No. They will just sponsor Al Gore to speak about global warming at a local meeting. Thanks to the Gore Effect, the temperature usually drops dramatically as soon as Gore arrives.
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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.
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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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.
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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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Upper 70s??? I'd go for that. I've had about enough of this 100 degree BS here.
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Guess they'll be in big trouble when global warming strikes Belgium!
Don't be silly. Everyone knows that Belgium doesn't really exist.
> Guess they'll be in big trouble when global warming strikes Belgium!
If global warming ever did what the alarmists keep saying it's going to do, chillers would probably become completely irrelevant, since about two thirds of Belgium would be continuously surface-mounted with a very large water-cooling rig and heatsink, sometimes known as the North Sea.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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.
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?
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.
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