8 News The evolution from CRAC to CREC
ECOCOOLING has completed its 200th data centre cooling installation using the energy saving technology.
“Using CRECs (computer room evaporative coolers) instead of the conventional CRAC units (computer room air conditioning units) can save over 90% of the energy needed to cool a data centre,” said EcoCooling managing and technical director Alan Beresford. “We are very pleased to announce Serve The World as the 200th data centre to adopt this solution at its 600kW Oslo facility in Norway.” Data centre engineers are by nature very cautious and it has taken a number of years for CREC cooling to be accepted as a safe and reliable alternative to expensive refrigeration-based CRAC cooling.
Serve The World now joins a list of data centre operators able to operate with PUEs (power utilisation effectiveness) of 1.2 or less regardless of
the level of occupancy in the data centre. Within the 200 installations there are data centres with power consumptions from 10kW to 1MW. For a 1MW installation the EcoCooling CREC solution would require only around 40kW of power compared to as much as 1000kW with conventional CRAC cooling. This saves the cost and infrastructure for 960kW of power.
Aberdeen University Data Centre has been awarded Data Centre Project of the Year in the BCS & Computing UK IT Industry Awards, covering the UK’s entire IT industry. A number of best practices including the deployment of EcoCooling CRECs has led to a PUE of less than 1.1. Explaining how the CREC technology works Mr Beresford said: “in temperate climates there are up to 365 days every year when ‘free cooling’ can be employed.
On a fair proportion of these days it is enough to pass air from outside through the data centre servers and other active equipment at a suitable rate and no cooling of that external air is needed at all. On the remaining days, it is sufficient to use a water evaporation technique which takes heat out of the incoming air and cools it sufficiently to cool an entire
Just for fun
IN FEBRUARY we asked you to caption this picture. The suggestions that we at ACR Towers liked best were: “Honestly, the manager said I could clean the indoor filters on the roof!” from Ian Lane of GalxC Cooling Services, and this corker from Tony Richardson: “‘Ere Bert, I think the fan might be going backwards!”
Bubbles in the Far East KoolBreeze
LONDON-BASED architect Orproject has designed a solution to air pollution in heavily affected cities in Asia, such as Beijing.
Reminiscent of domed cities in popular science fiction, Orproject proposes the construction of an enclosed park within the city. The air inside the park would be clean, with temperature and humidity controlled throughout the year.
The buildings surrounding the park, which would be connected to the controlled air system, can house apartments, offices and retail, but may also offer sports or medical facilities which make specific use of the healthy air.
ACR News April 2014
The heating and cooling of the air is done through a ground source heat exchange system.
Orproject, together with a specialist contractor, has developed a new type of construction system which is lightweight and affordable. The proposed roof system can be used to enclose an urban botanical garden, but the system also lends itself for many other applications at various scales – it can be used to economically enclose playgrounds or school yards, it can form the atrium of an office building or shopping mall, or it can be used to cover the gardens of an apartment complex.
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data centre.” Concerns of data centre engineers about the use of fresh air in data centres have not materialised. “With over five years operational experience and research data now available the EcoCooling CREC design principles and process controls have proven to provide a resilient and efficient cooling system,” said Mr Beresford.
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