How datacentres stay cool
by Natasha Christou Digital Marketing ConsultantOf course, the cloud isn’t actually a cloud.
Huge data centres across the world keep our digital world connected and powered
— the biggest of which reportedly
consumes enough energy to power a city with a population of 1 million.
These data centres are crucial for us to stream videos, download music, and
post on social media. If they crash, sudden outages quickly spark irritation
from customers, as British Airways found out in 2017 when a worldwide IT
failure of their systems lead to flight cancellations and delays over a bank
holiday weekend. The data centre failure was attributed by the CEO of British
Airways to a power surge and a back-up failure, but UK Power Networks denied
any power issues in the area that would have caused this.
Other sources speculate that overheating
was the culprit. The British Airways data centres were built in the 1980s
and were not built with today’s huge internet usage in mind. As a result, the
building is not equipped to deal with the excessive heat generated by the
modern data usage. Thus, the equipment shut down to protect itself from the
heat.
Large-scale IT downtime is chaos for
companies and users. Back in 2013, overheating
shut down Microsoft’s data centre for a whopping 16 hours. So, what
measures do the world’s biggest data centres take to ensure their servers don’t
overheat?
The problem of heat
The use of energy creates heat as a waste
product. According to Enerdata, the
IT sector consumes around 5–9% of the world’s electricity. This is only set
to grow as the world becomes more and more dependant on technology, with data
centres set to need a fifth of the globe’s energy generation by 2025. As a
result, there is a lot of pressure on IT companies to avoid the use of ‘dirty
energy’ and commit to renewable energy; three tech giants have long since
committed to 100% renewably powered internet (Apple, Google, and Facebook).
Data centres need to be able to run
efficiently and sustainably. EkkoSense ran a study on 128 data centres in the
UK and found 78%
of them were running too hot. This means these data centres are,
potentially, consuming too much energy or not using the energy efficiently.
Plus, if overheating causes a complete shutdown of servers, this could impact
users around the world.
Air conditioning’s role for data centres
The world’s largest data centres have a
number of methods at their disposal to maintain their temperature. Obviously, commercial
air
conditioner systems are frequently used to maintain optimum temperatures. Daikin
explains that a commonly used technique is
to utilise heat recovery technology, which uses the heat expelled during
the process of cooling to heat offices and water supplies. Another technique is
to install a system that uses cold air from outside whenever possible, reducing
the energy consumption of the air conditioning units as they switch off in the
meantime. This is known as ‘free cooling’.
Harnessing nature
Microsoft and Google have turned to nature
to look for ways to cool their data centres.
In 2011, Google housed a data centre in a building in Finland that uses
cold seawater to cool the facility. Prior to Google’s purchase of the building,
it was a paper mill that had a massive tunnel constructed beneath it, running
under the building and into the Gulf. The tunnel is now used to connect the
seawater to their cooling system in a no-energy free-flow system, and the
water is returned back to the Gulf cleaner than when it went in.
The
Huffington Post noted how Microsoft went a step further and put a whole
data centre into the ocean. The idea is, of course, the same — the cold
seawater off the coast of Scotland will keep the centre cool. The project is
touted to be powered by nothing but renewable energy and cooled by the ocean,
so its impact on the environment is minimal.
Sources:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/energy-hogs-can-huge-data-centers-be-made-more-efficient
http://www.green-co.uk/cool-heat-matters-data-centre/
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/overheating-brings-down-microsoft-data-center/
https://thestack.com/data-centre/2018/07/30/heatwave-data-centre/
https://www.daikin.co.uk/en_gb/solutions/infrastructure-and-data-centre-cooling.html
https://lifelinedatacenters.com/data-center/heat-generated-by-data-centers-can-recycled/
https://www.carbontrust.com/news/2012/10/six-drivers-for-the-development-of-green-it/
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Created on Mar 19th 2020 07:08. Viewed 460 times.