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HP's New Data Center Cooled By Glacial Wind
Arvisp writes with this snippet about HP's recently completed datacenter in northeast England, which utilizes the glacial wind blowing off the North Sea to lower temperatures of IT equipment and plant rooms: "The Wynyard takes in the cool air, filters it accordingly and collects it in the management system and is then forced over the front of the server racks before it is exhausted. The result is a hall with a constant temperature of 24C. When the winds become even colder than usual, the exhausted heat is mixed with the outside air to maintain temperatures."
Source: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/averages/ukmapavge.html#, although you'll have to do the last few clicks to get the correct chart.
What is so special about this?
Toronto has been using water from lake Ontario to cool the downtown core for years.
Did they add the cost to get the power, connectivity, equipment and personnel up there?
Up where? North-east England is not some remote wilderness. But it is cold.
Up there? It's not in the wilds of the arctic. My office is about 4 miles away from the place, and there is a very nice pub next to it.
glacial - adj
1. (Earth Sciences / Geological Science) characterized by the presence of masses of ice
2. (Earth Sciences / Geological Science) relating to, caused by, or deposited by a glacier
3. extremely cold; icy
4. cold or hostile in manner a glacial look
5. (Chemistry) (of a chemical compound) of or tending to form crystals that resemble ice glacial acetic acid
6. very slow in progress a glacial pace
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 6th Edition 2003. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003
It's England, it's not exactly a struggle to cross the country in less than day so I'm not sure you can call any part of England remote wilderness.
It's really not that tricky. All you need are temperature/humidity probes for the outdoor air and the return air and a control sequence that knows to use outdoor air instead of return air whenever the temp/humidity of the outdoor air is better. As you said, this is what an economizer does. There's nothing unusual about them, in fact they're required by code in many climates that have cool/dry air.
Also, they totally botched the definition of PUE - a PUE score of 1.2 means that for every 1.2 watts delivered to the data center, 1 watt of it goes directly into powering the equipment itself and is not maintenance money, like UPSs, cooling, battery backups, etc. So ~83% of power going in is used directly for the IT equipment itself. That's fantastic; the typical data center runs about 2.5 PUE.