Inside the World's Greenest Data Center

Published April 07, 2010

It's 360,000 square feet, large enough to hold eight 747 jumbo jets, and with its PUE of 1.2, Hewlett Packard's just-opened Wynyard data center is possibly the world's greenest large-scale facility.

We've reported on the facility before, both when it was first announced and when it opened this year. But I spoke today with Ed Kettler, a Fellow and Green IT Strategist at HP Enterprise Services, to get some further insight into the project.

Kettler talked about the challenge of turning a former shipping distribution center into a high-powered, highly efficient computing facility.

"We were approaching it as a way of building a standard box, like we used to do," Kettler said. "But with rising energy costs, we got together and organized a design team to determine the problem we were trying to solve and find out if there's a more efficient way to do this."

What they came up with is a holistically reworked facility that brings IT and construction innovations to bear on reducing overall energy use, cutting costs wherever possible as a result, and conserving and reusing resources at the same time.

"What can we do differently?" Kettler asked. "First, we can take advantage of Mother Nature instead of trying to fight or reinvent her."

The most widely reported featured of this facility is its use of free cold air from the nearby North Sea to provide as much as 97 percent of the chilling. Although HP did need to install traditional chillers for auxiliary support on the fewer than 10 days a year that the mercury climbs high enough outside to warrant additional support.

The Wynyard facility has a series of air handlers that condition the air to the right temperature and humidity, and then a number of low-rpm fans blow the air through the 12-foot-high raised floor to distribute it throughout the computing space.

cross section of HP's wynyard data center air handling system

The result is what Kettler calls "probably in the top 1 or 2 most efficient data centers in the world" for its size -- especially considering that it's a general-purpose facility that houses different vendors' hardware, different applications and a wide range of business models, as composed to Google or Yahoo single-function data centers with custom-built, highly efficient servers.

'coolocation' facilities

Anonymous, April 8, 2010 - 06:33

I've often wondered how big a barrier there is to placing datacenters in northern climates to use the abundance of cool air to naturally reduce temperatures in data centers. I imagine there's less of a bandwidth pipeline to places like alaska, but it seems like theres such a huge energy savings opportunity when you're dominated by such a constant, high cooling load...

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