Advanced Cooling Technology Can Cut Data Centers’ Energy Bills by One-Third
An advanced cooling technology capable of reducing the cooling costs of large data centers by one-third has been developed by researchers from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Toshiba.
The researchers are now “test-bedding a new data centre that combines Toshiba’s air cooling technology with NTU’s advanced info-communications technology (ICT),” a news release stated.
Aiming to provide a sustainable solution for the data centers that operate in South-East Asia’s tropical climate, the innovative test-bed is designed around a ‘cutting-edge modular structure’ (that is, container-sized modules that are able to stand alone or be combined with others for more computing power) and with an efficient, tailored cooling system.
The cooling system uses the air outside of the data center for cooling whenever possible. This cuts down greatly on the dat center’s air conditioning needs. Outside air can be used effectively whenever the outside temperature is lower than the overheated temperature inside the data center, but most cooling systems instead use solely air conditioning, which is very expensive.
“Most data centers use air-conditioning to cool their high speed computers round the clock, using re-circulated air regardless of its temperature, thus churning up a huge energy bill, as it takes more energy to cool down hot air.
“The new ICT technologies developed by NTU will optimise the use of computer servers in the data centre by consolidating multiple applications from different servers into one server, then putting the other servers which are not in use into sleep mode, saving both electricity and the energy needed to cool them.”
Data centers, which contain and maintain the “back-end information technology (IT) systems and data stores consisting of mainframes, servers and databases,” usually use 100 to 200 times more energy than conventional office buildings.
The technologies that were used in this test-bed have demonstrated energy savings of up to 40% when they are compared to conventional data centers used in Japan.
Source: Nanyang Technological University
Image Credits: Nanyang Technological University
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