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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."
Canada exporting cold (in whatever form) to California.
24C is 75F. That sounds like a wonderful place to work, as long as you don't have to go outside. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Bad news for the story writer - global warming is so far advanced that the North Sea is no longer glaciated.
And the land bridge between England and France has been swept away by the melt water!
While people who live in the North East of England would probably say the wind "were a bit chilly" most of the year, the nearest glaciers to Billingham would be in Norway, not exactly close enough to influence weather patterns...
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.
. . . great views out your data center window . . . great opportunities for winter sports fans . . . oh, and did I mention the mountain climbing . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
...then this is an interesting read.
It could also mean a very slow-moving wind...
Air blowing over sea water usually contains quite a bit of salt. I wonder how they will deal with the salt. People who live on beach front homes are versed in repair costs to their homes and cars from salt ait.
Cooling with outside air is a bit trickier, since the temperature of the air changes much more quickly. We do this in the computer room of a radio telescope on a 3500m high mountaintop. The AC system has an "economizer" feature provided to cool with outside air, which has been modified to use proportional control to get a much more steady room temperature than the original bang-bang controller. That's needed to keep the analog signal levels from drifting too quickly and messing up the Dicke switching (go look that up). Not so important in a datacenter.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Is it just me or does anyone else think that a great contributor to global warming is the method with which we create and consume power. We produce most of the electricity with steam and that steam needs to cool off before it can become steam again. They way that steam is cooled is either with water or surrounding air. Every nuclear reactor needs to be next to a river if the outside air is not cold enough. The river on which our reactor is built is 4C hotter after it passes the power plant because it's used to cool the steam. And that temperature increase is constant, all the time. Coal power plants do the same. Then, on the consumer side, we also convert much of that electricity into heat, with inefficient light bulbs, cars (thats why the engine needs a heatsink and a fan), electronic equipment, etc... If your computer uses 150W, thats 150W of heat output per hour. Human body outputs on average ~100Wh.
24C is way too much for a comfortable working environment. In my house, the heating system keeps the air at an average of 22C and it's sometimes so warm it's tiring.
ics
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.
So in other words, HP's new data center is heating the glacial wind. That means... they're going to melt the glaciers!!!111!
The source article misses some of the coolest design features of this facility. It has the equivalent of a 12-foot high raised floor, using the entire lower level of the facility as a cooling plenum. The fans bring the cool North Sea air into the lower chamber, and they manage the pressure to direct the air up into the server area. There's also a Computerworld story with more details but an erroneous headline that suggests that it's the "first-ever" wind cooled data center. The story makes it clear that the facility has chillers as backup for when the wind dies down or air temperature doesn't support free cooling. Both Microsoft and Google are already running data centers with no on-site chillers.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Its in Billingham, very near Middlesbrough. I'm only surprised they didn't put it nearer the coast, or further away from Middlesbrough.
Did no one read the second sentence in my post?
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.
Servers are N Units high. Most are 2 or 3 units. So why lie them flat and try to force air front to back when it wants to rise?
Rotate the servers 90 so they are vertical and leave an approx 1U air gap between them.
And while we're reconfiguring the shape of rack servers. Please put the network ports, console ports at the front, the power ports at the back.
Deleted
We have been doing this in Montana for a long time. When the AC units get frozen over we start pumping filtered air from the outside into the server room.
believing the big bang requires a certain amount of supernatural faith
They have backup chillers.
They all died trying.
I live in Florida. Subtropical is the norm. This "cold" is driving folks crazy. I've seen people wearing ski jackets to be able to handle it. I know a lot of people don't travel a lot. I've had my time in various climates (anywhere from 24 degrees N to 62 degrees N), so I can handle it, but most of my time was spent between 27 degrees N to 34 degrees N, where it's nice and warm. That's been split between the dry-summer subtropical and humid subtropical.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Man really is causing global warming.
All those x64 boxes would make the planet Mercury look like a winter wonderland. Now, if they just switched to ARM chips.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Guess it's a step in the right direction though, but really not that exciting all in all. I mean cooling by means of cold breeze, BFD. Instead of stopping at using the cold air to cool those racks they should take the full step and figure out a way to re-use the heat energy. Maybe some kind of thermocouple or Peltier system that takes advantage of the temperature difference between the hot server room and the "glacial winds". Or some kind of heat pump arrangement. Now that would be cool, pardon the pun.
I live across the north sea from the datacenter in a place called Norway. Where this ice cold wind supposedly blows from, and it aint here. As has been well known since the vikings raided that part of England, the winds actually blows *from* England *to* Norway 95% of the time. And here in Norway, it is a warm wet wind blowing from England, and it dumps a lot of rain in western Norway. The result is that even at 61 deg north, the winters are mostly rain, not snow. And in the summers, the ocean temperature is higher than Santa Cruz, CA. Compare that to Anchorage, AK at same latitude!
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Well, time for another anecdote from south of the border:
I just moved to a new apartment, three bedrooms, nice living area, the complex has a nice garden and there's a beautiful park just outside... Essentially, a great place for the kids to grow.
BUT! It's in the ground floor and there's not much light and DAMN its cold sometimes.
Right now, we are freezing every night... at 6-8 degrees Celsius in these mid-February nights (41-46 Fahrenheit)
Many of you will say "that's not cold!" but its certainly very cold for us!
Also, keep in mind that homes here aren't built with heating or AC, because we are used to have very temperate weather...
No sig for the moment.
I'm still unclear on the definition. If a center has a PUE of 2.5, does that (still) mean 1 watt is used for equipment, with 1.5 watts going to support systems?
Actually I think you will find its the gulf stream which warms the UK and Ireland.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Seems like a great way to actually warm the globe up to counteract this global warming(which is actually cooling).... but then again all this change of climate(seasons) would seem to be normal, as the weather usually does not stay the same! through the week, year, century, or millennium.
;)
BTW Personally I think algore is a lying profiteer, but that's my opinion... or I could be like algore and say it is a proven fact
FragHARD or don't frag at all
You're right in saying that a bunch of us won't think that's cold. (I'm just south of the border too - the Canadian border...) I was running around with my coat unzipped the other day, it was so warm. It was hot and sunny, and got all the way up to 0 C here! For February, that's pretty warm. 10 C is enough for me to skip the heavy jacket and hat and just wear a sweatshirt over my button-down shirt.
:-)
A college friend of mine is from Puerto Rico, and went home for Christmas. We figured out that it was 100 F colder here one night than at her house in PR. Needless to say, she wasn't so happy when she came back here.
That said, it sounds like you've found a great place to live. Best of luck, and stay warm.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
17-18C here. Welcome to Canada in winter with a budget heating bill ;)
--- Mr. DOS
In other words, try to hurt your company and make it even less successful, thereby ensuring that your workday blows even harder than it already does? Uh... okay, if that's what you want...
The Air conditioning at work is set to 25C, but I do live in the tropics (Darwin, AU) where outside it's 32C
Glacial? Well, the North Sea off NE England is around 6C at the moment but that's not what I'd call glacial. Last summer (not exactly a "scorcher") it reached 15C, the year before, 16C.
All of this ignores the obvious problem that the prevailing wind over the UK is a SW'ly - and thus the cooling from the sea won't really happen except in summer when sea breezes set in. Indeed, in the winter coastal areas are often warmer than inland. The recent easterlies and NE'lies over England recently have been pretty unusual, all caused by the jet stream being far to the south of usual (it's normally between Scotland and Iceland, but currently it's blasting over the Canaries and the Sahara!)
I note, however, that the link is to an Australian site, so by their standards it is pretty cold in this part of the world.
There is so much hot air in data centers these days.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It is currently 5 C outside this new datacentre. Nearby offices will be heated to 19-23 C. Humidity makes a big difference to how hot it feels, England is often quite humid (86% at the moment).
Did they add the cost to get the power, connectivity, equipment and personnel up there? And will they for more remote places when North America starts doing it?
It's in a town, population 35k, near some much larger towns (surrounding area has population 1M). It's probably better connected to roads and railways than most towns that size in the USA. I could drive there from London in 412 hours (or 4 hours by train), but there will be plenty of demand from much nearer places.
Power will be cheaper than in the south of England (to try and balance the load on the National Grid, many electricity-hungry factories are in the north). Connectivity isn't really an issue, it's only 250 miles from London, only 40 miles from Newcastle (pop. 800,000), and not far from undersea cables to Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway. Personnel will be cheaper than in the south of England, since the wages the banks in London can afford to pay distort things.
I don't know where a similar place in North America would be. Halifax, NS?
Hey moderidiots! This was a serious question! Not a flamebait!
So stop assuming everyone is an ass, just because you are a angry pessimist!
We should really only give mod points to people, who got any empathic competence. ;)
But I guess, here at Slashdot, that would come down to the handful of people who actually got a woman/gf.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I live in the South-end of South Africa where the temprature ranges from about 15C (Mid-winter average) to 35C (Mid-summer average).
Some places have aircon.
Central heating and double-glazing are myths invented by tourists.
When it gets warm, we sit around in a cool spot and drink beer and white wine. When it gets cool we sit inside around the fireplace and drink red wine and spirits.
And people wonder why I have a monstrous CPU-cooler on my pc...