Page 57 - European Energy Innovation - Spring 2016 publication

Spring 2016 European Energy Innovation 57

DATA CENTRES

Energy efficient technologies for data
centres

Data centre design was
originally focussed on
reliability, however today
there is greater awareness
of the need to make them more
sustainable. Life Cycle Assessment
(LCA) studies have identified that a
data centre’s energy use, embodied
impact and source energy are all
important factors in its environmental
impact.

Increasing policy and cost pressures responsibility of the IT infrastructure is important to allow cooling
have forced the data centre industry to team, however, the racks they choose, performance to be optimised.
look at how to become more energy their layout and their management will
efficient. Cooling is usually the largest impact the air delivery. Collaborative The temperature and humidity
energy consumer after IT load in a working and sharing of knowledge requirements for IT hardware have
legacy facility and the area with the
greatest potential for improvement.

Most IT equipment in the data centre is
air-cooled. Better understanding and
management of the environmental
requirements for IT equipment
enables significant improvements to
both the performance of cooling and
the potential reduction in its energy
requirements.

The results from several surveys in
legacy facilities has identified poor
delivery of cold air to IT equipment,
caused by both bypass of air from the
cooling units and recirculation of hot
server air [as illustrated in the diagrams
on the right]. The typical solution is
to reduce temperature set points and
increase cooling unit fan speeds, both
of which result in increased energy
consumption and do not address the
root causes of the problem.

This is in part caused by the different
stakeholders and contractual
requirements: the designer must
ensure the cooling units deliver the
required amount of cooling to the
room but are usually not responsible
for the delivery path of the cold air to
the IT equipment. This is also not the

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