Contracting ceilings. Liquid-cooled racks of servers. Oxygen levels so low employees need frequent breaks.
The test center makes use of a smoke machine to trace the flow of cool air, says Claude Fiori of T-Systems
These are some of the extreme measures Intel and partner T-Systems, a division of Deutsche Telekom, are employing to lower the power consumption of a prototype data center in Munich.
The companies discussed the test center at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon and expect to publish results of their experiment later this year.
Data centers in the U.S. consume about 1.2 percent of the nation’s electricity – about as much as all color TVs – making greater efficiency a useful exercise in the battle against global warming.
The aim of the experiment is to look at the efficiency of the facility as a whole rather than at each of its piece parts individually. That is reason for the 15 percent oxygen level – a security and cost saving measure.
A fire that breaks out won’t be able to burn on its own, saving the center the cost of installing water and gas fire protection systems, says T-Systems’ Claude Fiori, head of GDU-IAS Workers can stay in the room for four hours before needing a break.
The center also makes use of smoke machine to trace the flow of cool air and pumps chilled liquid into racks of servers. Its 7-ton ceiling rises and falls with the push of a button, allowing administrators to adjust it between 8 and 14 feet high for optimum center cooling.
Also to better control temperature and humidity, the walls are coated with an aluminum-backed paper for insulation.
With the U.S. government preparing to release data center energy-use benchmarks, centers may have no choice but to improve efficiency, says Fiori. “We have to look at green IT.”
[...] } Today, I’ve been reading about the new Intel experimental data center hereand here. The thing that really caught my eye is their method of fire [...]