Communications of the ACM
Data Center Innovation: New Ways to Save Energy
Credit: Federal Computer Week
The High Tech and Industrial Systems Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was recently designated the U.S. Energy Department's Center of Expertise for energy efficiency in data centers. The center aims to provide tools, best practices, and technologies to help federal agencies improve their energy efficiency. Although data center officials have accepted the efficiency message, some facilities have yet to widely adopt energy-efficient technologies.
An array of energy-saving practices are available to data centers. For example, industry-accepted environmental guidelines now tolerate higher temperature and humidity levels in data centers, which results in more cooling options than were previously available, including "free" methods such as evaporative cooling and emerging techniques such as immersion cooling. The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative is creating data centers with more computing power in a smaller footprint, but require more electricity than lower-density environments.
Meanwhile, ASHRAE, a global organization that establishes thermal standards for data centers, has raised the climate threshold for such facilities to 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The shift in guidance has opened up new opportunities for cooling methods, says Berkeley Lab's William Tschudi. "If you walk into a data center and it's cold, there is typically an efficiency opportunity there," Tschudi says. "You don't need to have it be a meat locker."
From Federal Computer Week
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