Data Center Managers Get Free Cooling Tips from the Green Grid

Published October 05, 2009

PORTLAND, OR — The Green Grid last week unveiled a series of new offerings to help to cut costs and boost efficiency in data centers around the world.

The consortium has released a combination of detailed maps showing how much free cooling is available and how much money IT managers can save by using free cooling in their facilities.

New to the latest round of releases are maps highlighting how many hours per year free cooling is available in 33 European countries; earlier this year the group released similar maps for North American and Japanese data centers.

“Data centers with increasing IT loads require more power to cool them, so finding cooling options that use less power is critical not only for organizations that don’t have resources to build new facilities but also for those that want to save money,” Vic Smith, Dell representative and EMEA technical work group chair of The Green Grid, said in a statement. “For much of the year, the air outside data centers can be cooler than the air inside. This tool that The Green Grid has developed will help determine how much free cooling a specific data center can leverage.”

The online calculator lets data center managers input their local energy costs, IT load and overall facility load to determine how much energy savings can be gained by using free outside air for cooling rather than chillers. One example offered by the group found that a 1-megawatt data center in Luton, England, paying 13.6 cents per kilowatt hour could save €340,000 per year (about US$497,000) using free cooling.

Free cooling is an increasingly common tool for data center managers to save on costs and increase the energy efficiency of their facilities; a new data lab on Microsoft's campus uses outside-air cooling as much as 95 percent of the time, and over the summer Google announced similar plans for its Belgian data center.

More details about the Green Grid's free data center cooling resources are online at GreenerComputing.com.

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Data Center Managers Get Free Cooling Tips from the Green Grid