EcoCooling notches up 350 data centres
EcoCooling reports having delivered 350 installations for data centres using direct-air evaporative cooling. The installations include data centres with power consumptions from 10 kW to 1 MW.
Alan Beresford, EcoCooling’s managing and technical director, explains, ‘Using CRECs [computer-room evaporative coolers] instead of the conventional CRAC [computer-room air-conditioning units] can save over 90% of the energy needed to cool a data centre.’
A CREC solution for a 1 MW installation would require only about 40 kW of power compared with as much as 1 MW for conventional CRAC cooling — saving the cost and infrastructure for 960 kW of power.
One EcoCooling project, the data centre at Aberdeen University, was data-centre project of the year in the BCS & Computing UK IT industry awards. Competition included Tesco, Capital One and the NHS.
CREC is based on using free cooling from outside air to meet much of the cooling requirement of a data centre. For a fair proportion of the year, it is sufficient to pass outside air through the servers and other active equipment at a suitable rate — with no supplementary cooling. On the remaining days, it is sufficient to use the technique of water evaporation to cool incoming air before it enters the data centre.
Alan Beresford comments, ‘Concerns of data-centre engineers about the use of fresh air in data centres have not materialised. With over five years’ operational experience and research data now available from these 350 installations, the EcoCooling CREC design principles and process controls have proven to provide a resilient and efficient cooling system.
‘I think the list of major players that have fully researched the topic and have then implemented EcoCooling technology demonstrate that data-centre engineers can now consider this power-saving technology as being fully “of age”.’
