Green Grid, ASHRAE to Collaborate

The Green Grid and ASHRAE will work together on publications that provide guidance on data center design, a development that could improve the effectiveness of data center cooling. The two groups said today that they will share technical information on energy efficiency.

ASHRAE develops best practices for 50,000 professionals in HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), and has issued recommendations for data center efficiency through its Technical Committee 9.9. The Green Grid is an industry consortium of data center operators and vendors.

‘Roll Your Own’ Thermal Monitoring

Blade servers and high-density racks continue to create “hot spots” inside data centers. Detecting these hot spots before they cause servers to overheat is a critical challenge. There are a growing number of vendor offerings that can provide data center managers with sophisticated thermal mapping and monitoring of their facilities. But in recent weeks we’ve seen several providers develop their own monitoring systems. Here’s a look at two innovative approaches to hot spot detection:

• Austin colocation provider Core NAP has built a system of low voltage thermal sensors tied together over Cat5 cable, which is summarized at IT Knowledge Exchange: “The monitors report back to a database that can map data center temperatures in real-time. (Core NAP) plans to be able to put multiple monitors in cabinets, under floors, and in the cable runs above of the racks. The sensors from Maxim IC report to USB readers plugged into Linux hosts. The hosts log data to a local web server, and Core NAP plans to combine that info with Visio maps of the data center.” Jeremy Porter, the Senior Internet Data Center Architect at Core NAP, says this approach will save money compared to off-the-shelf solutions.

IBM Cool Blue Shines in Vendor ‘Chill Off’

IBM’s Cool Blue Rear Door Heat eXchanger liquid cooling unit earned bragging rights in a vendor “chill off” that tested multiple vendor products in the same data center environment.

1,500 Watts A Square Foot? A Look at TSCIF

Switch Communications says it is successfully cooling a section of its Las Vegas data center running at nearly 1,500 watts per square foot using air cooling. How are they accomplishing this?

The key to Switch’s high-density cooling is a design known as Thermal Separate Compartment in Facility (TSCIF), according to company co-founder Rob Roy. The ingredients in this approach include high-capacity AC units placed outside the data center area, and a tightly integrated hot aisle containment system for the racks. Here’s an overview:

• The cabinets are set on a slab, with no raised floor.
• Chilled air is delivered into the cold aisle near the ceiling rather than through the floor, and enters the cabinets through the front.
• Each cabinet fits into a slot in the TSCIF unit, which encapsulates the rear and sides of each cabinet, while the open front extends beyond the enclosure.
• The hot aisle containment system delivers waste heat back into the ceiling plenum, where it can be returned to the chiller.

Some photos of the TSCIF system can be seen here, and more images and diagrams are available on the Switch web site. A number of data center providers forego a raised floor for overhead cooling, most notably Equinix (EQIX). Heat containment systems are also becoming more widely used.

Switch says the combination of those techniques, along with custom cooling equipment, enables it to handle unusually high power and heat loads. Roy says the data center cold aisle is maintained at 68 degrees, while the temperature in the hot aisle reaches well above 100 degrees, creating a heat differential of nearly 40 degrees.

The Vegas SuperNAP: A Data Center Revolution?

Switch Communications’ SuperNAP, a 400,000 square foot data center under construction in Las Vegas, is a conversation starter. The facility’s operators say the $350 million facility will be the most advanced data center yet, supporting power loads exceeding 1,500 watts per square foot using only air cooling.

Rob Roy, co-founder of Switch Communications, says his company is the best-kept secret in the data center industry. After operating for eight years in stealth mode, serving a client base of military government and military and government customers and large Internet companies, the SuperNAP represents a coming out party for Switch and the data center technologies it has developed.

After years of media silence, Roy has begun discussing Switch’s operations and ambitions for the SuperNAP. The first mention of the SuperNAP leaked out May 5 on the blog for Silverback Migration Solutions, a Switch customer. This past weekend Roy was profiled in The Register, which also received a tour of one of Switch Communications’ five existing Las Vegas data centers. There’s also now a company website, providing information about Switch’s operations and a video preview of the SuperNAP.

We’ve spoken recently with Roy, who was enthusiastic about the data center technologies developed by Switch, and dismissive of those in the industry who might view his claims as improbable. “This is an industry of naysayers,” Roy said.

Roy says Switch operates a room in one of its data centers with cabinets for a name-brand customer running at 1,462 watts per square foot. Roy predicts that the SuperNAP will also be able to support customer power loads of 1,500 watts per square foot.

Data Center Heats a Greenhouse

We’ve seen in a number of interesting uses of data center waste heat in recent months, most notably
IBM’s system to use waste heat from a data center in Switzerland to heat a nearby community swimming pool.

Paul Brenner from the University of Notre Dame Center for Research Computing has developed another novel approach to recycling waste heat. In a recent presentation at an open source conference in Oakland, Brenner said he had placed a rack of high-performance computing (HPC) nodes at a local municipal greenhouse, the South Bend Greenhouse and Botanical Garden, to help heat the flowers and plants in the facility. Here’s a description from Sun’s Mike Stevens:

Based on early prototype work which involves placing single rack in the greenhouse, the idea looks like a promising way to reduce natural gas heating requirements for the facility. Brenner has shown he can use grid scheduling software to deliver a desired temperature (within a range, of course) by simply adding or throttling compute jobs on the greenhouse cluster, which communicates with Notre Dame via a wide-area wireless broadband connection. He has looked at humidity issues and so far they don’t seem to be a problem given the ranges supported by typical compute gear. And he points out that while the greenhouse environment does not offer the highly filtered environment of a controlled datacenter, the particulate tolerance for typical compute gear is far in excess of EPA guidelines for people. Phase II will involve placing three full racks of gear at the greenhouse to significantly reduce heating costs. Notre Dame will pay the electrical costs and use the compute resources. The city saves money on heating.

Brenner’s full presentation is available online (PDF).

Dell Explores Liquid Cooling for Servers

What’s going on in data center innovation at Dell (DELL)? John Halamka, the CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, recently visited Dell’s Round Rock, Texas headquarters for a data center tour and executive briefing. John shares a summary of the experience on his Life As A Healthcare CIO blog (link via the CIO Weblog).

It’s an interesting writeup. The Beth Israel team got a tour of one of Dell’s Tier III data centers, which runs “lights out” (only a data center manager and security guards). They also got a briefing from a representative from Dell’s office of the CTO, who discussed future approaches to cooling:

They are now exploring liquid cooling. They had experimented with liquid cooling the individual processors. The speaker did not see this as having a practical data center application due to the risks of a burst line. The direction he sees is the development of a cold plate or cover. In this technique, chilled water is run through the upper or lower cover like a radiator and provides cooling to the entire case.

Dell is also planning to design components that can be powered down when not in use (down to the subsystem level) and is planning on using hot aisle containment in its company data center. Read John’s blog for more.

Taiwan Firm Demos Cooling Without Electricity

Taiwan’s Micro-Star International (MSI) recently demonstrated a power design that can cool a PC motherboard without electricity. The design employs a fan that is powered only by the movement of heat and air, using an approach known as the Stirling Engine Theory. It is named for Robert Stirling, a Scottish pastor of the early 1800s who grew concerned about the danger workers in his parish faced from steam engines of the era, which were prone to explosions. He invented the heat economizer, which uses hot air rather than steam.

In MSI’s demo, the “Air Power Cooler” transfers the chipset waste heat into air momentum. As the air becomes hot, it exerts upward force on a piston, which in turn drives a fan that cools the heatsink. The company demonstrated the technology recently at the CeBIT technology show. Can it scale to handle higher heat loads? See Hexus and Tweaktown for more details. There are also YouTube videos of an animation illustrating the concept and a brief clip of the unit in action (it’s about 25 seconds into a longer MSI CeBit promo).

Data Center Used to Heat Swimming Pool

Here’s a hot one - literally: A new data center in Switzerland is being used to heat a nearby swimming pool. In what appears to be a first, the town pool in Uitikon, Switzerland will be heated by waste heat from a data center recently built by IBM Corp. for GIB-Services AG.

The AP reports that the hot air generated by the Uitikon center will flow through heat exchangers to warm water that will be pumped into the nearby pool. The town covered the cost of some of the connecting equipment but will get to use the heat for free. IBM says the volume of heat thrown off by GIB-Services’ data center is enough to warm 80 homes. Or one swimming pool, it seems.

CFD Modeling: Cool Tool for Hot Spots

Data center thermal modeling using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is gaining popularity as a tool for analyzing the effectiveness of cooling within the racks and aisles. CFD provides companies with a detailed 3-D analysis of how cold air is moving through a data center, identifying potential “hot spots” where equipment is receiving too little airflow. Thermal mapping can also find areas in a data center that are receiving more cold air than needed, wasting cooling and energy.

With the push for greater efficiency in data center power and cooling, CFD is becoming an essential tool for many companies, according to Paul McGluckin, a research VP at Gartner. “There was a time when this was an esoteric gearhead kind of thing, but not anymore,” said McGluckin. “It’s well worth the cost to identify potential hot spots ahead of time. If your consultant doesn’t think it’s necessary, get another vendor who will assist you with this.”

Computational fluid dynamics is used to generate flow simulations with the help of computers. It is widely used in aerospace, biomedicine, semiconductors, and developing advanced graphics for movies and games.

“CFD is the best tool for making sure your (data center) model is thorough,” said Pete Sacco, president of PTS Data Center Solutions, who gave a presentation about CFD solutions at the DataCenterDynamics New York event. “We use it as a design tool and also as an operational maintenance tool. It allows me to consider several options for air conditioning, and try alternate approaches that I wouldn’t necessarily try in a client facility.”