14 DAY TRIAL // Among the most important energy consumers in the whole IT industry, the data center has a very special and near the top place, their projected energy consumption being said to double until 2011. So a new set of specifications and guidelines have been drawn up in an attempt to minimize energy waste and electricity bills.
According to this site, PG&E confirmed that a list of several changes in the data centers layout and configurations could lead to important energy savings of up to 45 percent. Since most computing equipment inside a data center must be kept at a relatively low temperature, an important part of the energy consumed by the data center goes to cooling solutions. A typical data center configuration asks for servers to be positioned in several aisles, with the front server covers facing each other inside such an aisle, while the backs of the servers are facing each other in the next aisle. According to the newest research, this configuration has a number of weak spots.
Inside an aisle, the temperature can vary widely and the bottom row of servers may be kept cold, while the top rows will suffer from excessive heat. Because air is re-circulated between the servers' aisles, hotspots may appear, with high temperatures which can damage the servers. Based on these issues and abservations, PG&E is proposing a new data center layout and configuration that is hoped will reduce both varying temperatures and energy consumption needed for cooling solutions.
PG&E's solution is to seal off the cold air aisles, creating cold air tunnels that could equally chill all server banks while eliminating any eventual hostspots. In order to decrease the energy consumption, cold outside could be filtered and used in 20 percent of the time, while shutting off the cooling devices. On the down side, sealing off the cold aisle could mean several problems for the service personnel when maintenance is needed.