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."

Comments

North sea has melted

[johnw]

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!

Re:North sea has melted

[Anonymous Coward]

I think "glacial" in Native Aussie English means "too cold to fry an egg on the pavement".

Re:Total cost

[bloobloo]

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.

Air is not water.

[NixieBunny]

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.

Re:Air is not water.

[NixieBunny]

At 3500m altitude, even tying your shoelaces is tricky.