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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Glacial obviously just means `cold`, in this context.
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