Issue 2, February 2009
FOCUS AWARDS FEATURE
THE GREEN DATA CENTRE AWARD
Winner: EDS SMC4 Data Centre, in partnership with Norman Disney & Young, and Houseman Henderson Architects Sponsor: EDF Energy
restrictions of traditional designs and so introduced workshops that were facilitated by the reputed environmental think tank, the Rocky Mountains Institute (RMI), to encourage fresh thinking.
Recognising that cooling was the most significant opportunity for energy saving and that the mean ambient temperature in the North East of England was low, the team decided to use the cool northern air to directly cool the IT equipment and plant rooms. This approach is expected to provide an annual energy saving of about 40% compared with a typical data center design.
After much tuning, alteration and modification, the final design includes eight 2.2m diameter variable speed axial fans for each hall used to supply air, and another eight used for exhaust air, in an N+2 arrangement.
Chris Glover of EDF Energy (left) and winner Mark Mawser of EDS
EDS wanted their Design Team – Norman Disney & Young (NDY) – to overcome the
A mixing chamber is also included to recirculate air to maintain conditions in the pressurised plenum below the computer equipment.
This low-velocity plenum is 5m high. Upstream, there are high-quality single-bank filters, humidification and cooling coils to
tune the outside air condition and remove contaminants.
The key to the success of the air-cooled strategy in achieving very low-energy usage is the design of a lower velocity, low-pressure system. Normal full-load running power for the supply and extract fans is less than 5% of total facility load, and mechanical cooling is only required for 200 hours per year to achieve ASHRAE preferred conditions.
Using the data from a base scheme, NDY was able to determine where energy was being consumed, identify opportunities for improvement and quantify the impact of their proposed designs. At all stages, designs were compared against the base design scheme.
The savings that can be made by adopting this strategy of using fresh air are considerable. In this example, the data center PUE is 1.16, a great improvement on legacy data centers that have PUEs typically between 1.8 and 3, and also provides significant savings on current best practice, where the traditional design gives a PUE of about 1.5.
At an average of 9 pence per kWh, the design saves approximately £1m per year per hall
Norman Disney & Young are proud to be leading the Design Team for the award winning EDS, an HP company, datacentre
Congratulations to the whole Team Green Datacentre 2008
www.ndy.com LONDON | MANCHESTER | DUBAI | SYDNEY | MELBOURNE | BRISBANE | PERTH | CANBERRA | ADELAIDE | AUCKLAND | WELLINGTON
www.datacenterdynamics.com
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