The trade should fastidiously weigh native assets, alongside evolving metrics like PUE and WUE to make the appropriate selection for cooling, based on Andrew Livesey, Affiliate Director at Cundall.
Knowledge centres are the spine of your digital world. Each on-line interplay – whether or not streaming, cloud computing, or digital transactions – depends on these amenities. Recognising their position, the UK Authorities has now categorised information centres as mission-critical infrastructure. Nonetheless, with nice demand comes nice accountability. The amenities ought to be designed with sustainability in thoughts.
A specific problem in information centre design is managing the warmth produced by the servers. Excessive-performance IT gear, specifically, generates enormous volumes of thermal masses. This necessitates environment friendly cooling options to keep up their operational effectivity. Sometimes, engineers select from two fundamental cooling strategies: power-based or water-based.
But, the selection isn’t easy. Particular person variations within the area, like water shortage or power grid emissions, can affect what would be the most effective strategy. As the info centre trade pushes for better sustainability, operators are more and more weighing the advantages and trade-offs that come from utilizing water or energy to chill their gear.
Water’s position
For years, enhancing energy utilization effectivity (PUE) has been a prime precedence in information centre design. This has led many operators to favour water-based cooling options. These programs usually fall into two classes: direct air and oblique air cooling.
Direct-air cooling harnesses outside air drawn into the info corridor and handed by way of an evaporative humidifier. Because the water evaporates, it cools the air coming into the system, which is circulated by way of the power. This usually makes use of an air-side economiser to recirculate the nice and cozy air, making a cyclical system that enhances the general effectivity.
Oblique air cooling follows an analogous precept. Nonetheless, it makes use of a warmth exchanger to switch warmth between inner and exterior airflows. Water enhances the exchanger’s efficiency, serving to to reject warmth whereas stopping exterior air from coming into the info corridor. In reasonable climates just like the UK, Eire, and Germany, these programs eradicate the necessity for chiller compressors, which considerably lowers power demand and maximises energy obtainable for IT masses.
Nonetheless, water consumption in information centres has been a degree of rivalry lately. Finish clients, governments, and regulators have grow to be involved about water use for cooling information centres – significantly in areas that face water shortages.
Designers can use chiller-based options in water-scarce areas, the place electrical energy could also be extra available. Moreover, the expansion in AI has heightened the adoption of liquid cooling, given the upper rack densities. Liquid cooling depends on hydronic programs that flow into coolant by way of server racks earlier than ejecting warmth through a sequence of chillers. Whereas this strategy meets the thermal demand of AI workloads, it has a knock-on impact on PUE as energy consumption is elevated.
Location determines the most effective cooling strategy
The geographical location of a knowledge centre typically determines probably the most sustainable cooling resolution. Local weather situations, useful resource availability, and current infrastructure all affect whether or not water or electrical energy is the extra viable choice.
In water-scarce areas like California, extended droughts have made water-based cooling options impractical. Operators typically transfer to air-cooled chillers and different electricity-driven cooling strategies. They profit from a comparatively clear and steady energy grid, making these choices extra possible. Conversely, nations like Poland have easy accessibility to huge volumes of water. However their energy grid stays reliant on fossil fuels so utilizing power-based programs will increase the carbon footprint of the cooling resolution. In conditions like these, utilizing the obtainable water quite than energy could also be extra sustainable.
Past these standard choices, progressive cooling choices are rising. Waste warmth restoration captures and repurposes warmth generated by information centres, redirecting it to district heating networks, places of work, or industrial amenities. A profitable implementation of this may be seen in Denmark, the place a hyperscale information centre partnered with Fjernvarme Fyn to provide 165,000 MWh of warmth per yr to a district heating system.
Even the usage of sea and river water cooling has been used as an choice. It depends on utilizing the naturally low temperatures of huge our bodies of water to dissipate warmth. This reduces the reliance on compressors and takes benefit of the pure assets obtainable. Nonetheless, as soon as once more, this can be a location-specific alternative that should be thought of throughout the web site due diligence section of design planning.
Rethinking how we measure sustainability
Sustainability is a elementary consideration in fashionable information centre design. Laws just like the Paris Settlement and the UK Internet Zero Carbon Buildings Commonplace define pathways in direction of web zero carbon. However the way in which we measure sustainability in information centres wants to vary as conventional metrics don’t seize the total environmental impression.
PUE has been the trade commonplace for years. It measures the effectivity by discovering the ratio between complete power consumption and the power consumed by IT gear. It has its makes use of, however when evaluating amenities that rely extra on water-based cooling, water utilization effectiveness (WUE) ought to be used.
But, WUE can also overlook the water embedded in energy era. If a knowledge centre depends on an power supply that consumes massive volumes of water throughout manufacturing, WUE might now point out its full environmental impression.
To supply a extra holistic view, some advocate for the effectiveness of carbon utilization (CUE). This shifts the main target to carbon emissions. This allows operators to view the trade-offs between power consumption and water use. This could present a extra complete strategy to figuring out cooling methods. Regardless of the case, a singular concentrate on PUE or WUE might not be ample. We have to view these metrics holistically to get the most effective perspective.
Is it a one match resolution?
The reality is, there isn’t one precise approach to construct and funky a knowledge centre. Like all constructing, the construction’s location, price range, and objective dictate the way it ought to be designed. Nonetheless, we’ve seen that corporations are more and more utilizing reference designs to hurry up the supply of information centres when constructing in several areas. These templates are helpful and might make design faster as you aren’t ranging from scratch, however they can’t be copied and pasted. Because of the nature of those amenities, corporations nonetheless want a crew of skilled designers to contemplate the positioning’s native nuances to find out whether or not water or energy is probably the most environment friendly cooling resolution.
