Saint-Ghislain, Belgium — The evolution of data center efficiency has taken another step in Google's data center in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium: the facility has no chillers to keep temperatures down.
 
Rather than using internal air-conditioning for cooling the hardware, the company is relying on the normally low temperatures in Belgium to provide all the free cooling its servers need.

In an article in Data Center Knowledge, Rich Miller writes:

The climate in Belgium will support free cooling almost year-round, according to Google engineers, with temperatures rising above the acceptable range for free cooling about seven days per year on average. The average temperature in Brussels during summer reaches 66 to 71 degrees, while Google maintains its data centers at temperatures above 80 degrees.

So what happens if the weather gets hot? On those days, Google says it will turn off equipment as needed in Belgium and shift computing load to other data centers. This approach is made possible by the scope of the company’s global network of data centers, which provide the ability to shift an entire data center’s workload to other facilities.

As a result of its use of outside-air for cooling the data center, Google will save tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in cooling costs, while also cutting back on the greenhouse gas emissions tied to the electricity used to run the chillers. These type of dual-savings IT practices are increasingly common, as a new study from Forrester research found that, although the recession has begun to impact green IT practices, cost savings are a key driver for getting the go-ahead on green projects.