Green UPS Data Center in Alpharetta

According to Joe Parrino, who heads the UPS Windward Data Center in Alpharetta Georgia, the rapid build-out of server farms and data centers is straining the grid in many parts of the country, especially in the Northeast. The IT industry is the sixth largest consumer of electricity, ahead of transportation, oil, and other decidedly heavy industries.

Since the industry’s inception its primary goal, reflected in the charter mission of the Uptime Institute founded in 1993, has been and remains reliability – uptime. But the quest for rock-solid data centers left little room for resource efficiency, or even a reliable metric to adequately gauge that efficiency.

Feeding the beast
A McKinsey report released earlier this year shows in stark terms how the current trend in the growth and energy consumption for data centers is rapidly becoming unsustainable. Energy costs are rising at an astonishing 16% per year. Greenhouse gas emissions from data centers already surpass that of Argentina.

Clearly there is more than reliability to be considered with the accelerating growth; the rush to build-out bandwidth without regard to the economic and environmental consequences of profligate and runaway energy consumption can’t be sustainable for very long.

Joe Parrino and his team at the Windward Data Center set out to find solutions and find ways to “tame the beast”.

Achieving Eficiency
Parrino achieves much of his efficiency in his cooling system. Windward was installed with two 1,000–ton centrifugal chillers and two 800–ton absorption chillers. There is also a 650,000 gallon thermal storage tank originally designed to provide 20 hours of backup cooling, but Parrino’s team employs a plate heat exchanger to cool the water in the storage tank using ambient nighttime outdoor temperatures.

The process is more complex than I need to go into here, involving wetbulb temperature and the like, but the upshot is that Parrino is able to shut down his 500 kilowatt chillers for up to seven months of the year, effectively providing the center with “free” cooling. In 2007, the chillers were shut down on October 11th and not turned back on again until May 18th of this year. The annual energy savings is about 1,440,000 kilowatts, eliminating 1000 tons of carbon emissions, and reducing energy costs by up to $100,000. All this in Georgia, where it gets hot. If more northerly data centers adopted Parrino’s innovative approach, the savings could be even greater.

Another source of efficiency gain Parrino found “by accident” was with the air handlers for the server power distribution units (PDU). Parrino’s team discovered several air flow inefficiencies with the air flow through the PDU’s. With modification Parrino is able to turn off 23 of the 65 air handler fans in the computer room, saving another 261 kilowatts of energy every hour and another $190,000 per year.

Parrino pointed out that these steps to efficiency are not only “green” but make business sense. Not only is there significantly lowered energy costs, but equipment life is extended and capital costs are reduced as well.

Triple Pundit