Fresh Air Can Cool Data Centers, Says Intel

Intel has recently concluded a ten-month experiment on energy saving solutions for data centers announcing that a possible answer to power and money saving would be fresh air cooling. According to the chip manufacturer giant, the experiment took place in the New Mexico desert, and air conditioning was replaced with piping outside air. Although the equipment was covered in dust and there were major temperature changes, which are not considered desirable for data centers, the machines were not affected, says the company.

"Servers... were subjected to considerable variation in temperature and humidity, as well as poor air quality; however, there was no significant increase in server failures," said the research paper issued by Intel. "If subsequent investigation confirms these promising results, we anticipate using this approach in future, high-density data centers."

The company said that pumping fresh air into data centers could result in lower costs. According to Intel, around $143,000 (£79,000) can be annually saved for a small 500kW data center, considering an electricity cost of eight cents per kWh. When it comes to larger 10MW data centers, the cost reduction could rise to $2.87 million.

The outside air was filtered only with a normal air filterer, which only took larger particles, while the fine dust went inside. The 32 servers and racks used for the experiment were covered with dust, and the company monitored humidity, but did not control it. Even so, the failure rate was only 4.46 percent, a small one compared to the 3.83 percent failure rate registered in Intel's main datacenter during the same period.

The experiment started in October 2007 and ended in August 2008. The server units were split into two compartments, and racked over 900 blades, which were used for production design. According to the company, only one compartment was cooled using fresh air, and registered temperatures ranging from 18 to 32°C. The other compartment was used as control and was air conditioned.

The purpose of the experiment was to establish whether temperature, humidity and air quality have such a great impact on data centers. The starting point was the belief that there are some optimal operating conditions that need to be strictly maintained. According to Intel, as servers are meant to offer optimal performance in temperatures of up to 37°C, the air cooling solution can be a feasible one.

This experiment took place as part of the 'Intel IT's Eight-Year Data Center Efficiency Strategy' program intended to reduce data center costs.