DATA CENTRE COOLING
Sustainable cooling: the data driven approach
Energy intensive and essential to practically every aspect of modern life, data centres are currently responsible for around three percent of the UK’s energy consumption. With demand for digital data on the rise, its predicted that the carbon footprint of the data centre sector will soon overtake that of the aviation industry. Toby Hunt, from Guardian Water Treatment, looks at how data centres can take a more sustainable approach to cooling and in the process, reduce costs, downtime and emissions.
A
few years ago, researchers at Imperial College London found that every gigabyte (GB) of outbound data has a water
footprint of around 200 litres. There are an estimated 50 million smartphone users in the UK and with video streaming and social media use on the rise, the average consumer uses much more than 1GB every month - 1.9GB on average. In order to support our digital habits, data centres can use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water in a single day, in addition to the vast amount of energy required to power the servers. With fi gures such as these seemingly at odds with our commitment to reduce our carbon emissions, data centre owners and their maintenance teams are under increasing pressure to not only prevent downtime, but to improve operational sustainability. With the right systems in place these two aims can go hand in hand, creating more reliable data centres that use less power, water and labour to keep them cool and effi cient.
40 November 2019
Cooling conundrum Data centres must maintain a constant temperature of around 20 to 24 degrees to prevent equipment from overheating. When servers become too hot, they start to perform ineffi ciently and unreliably. If exposure to extreme temperatures is prolonged, servers will shut down completely to protect themselves, causing lasting damage to equipment or large-scale loss of crucial data. Cooling capacity is directly related to operational
effi ciency and continuity of service. It is one of the most signifi cant challenges facing the data centre sector and accounts for a large portion of data centre running costs – around 38%. If effi ciency improvements can be made to the cooling process, then resources and costs can be saved, and sustainability increased – a win-win scenario.
Reduce, reuse, recycle Water cooling systems, such as cooling towers, chillers and diabatic coolers, are a popular choice
for large data centres as water is a much better heat transfer medium than air. However, this process consumes vast quantities of water, sometimes hundreds of thousands of gallons every day.
Signifi cant savings can be made using a water recycling system that recovers around 60 – 70% of bleed water from cooling towers for recycling, as well as collecting rainwater for reuse. Using a combination of media fi ltration, ion exchange and membrane fi ltration, a high percentage of dissolved solids are also removed, and all bacteria, algae and viruses are discharged. This process means the recycled water is often purer than when it originally entered the cooling system, meaning that concentrations can be cycled up much higher when compared to softened water, leading to a further reduction in chemical and water usage. Working off the assumption that 65% of the cooling tower bleed off can be recovered using a
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