KC Mares, the founder of MegaWatt Consulting and a veteran designer of large-scale data centers, writes in a recent blog post (discovered by way of Rich Miller) that he has achieved what would be industry-leading levels of energy efficiency for the same cost or lower than building less-efficient facilities.
In three recent facilities, Mares writes, he was able to achieve a power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of less than 1.10: one at 1.08, one at 1.06 and one at 1.05.
PUE is a measure of how much energy entering a data center goes to computing instead of non-computing elements like HVAC or lighting. A ratio of 1.0 means that every watt entering the facility goes right to computing, and some of the best PUEs companies have publicized lately start at 1.24, the PUE of the Microsoft data lab I toured this week, and Microsoft has also obtained a PUE, while Google has gotten to 1.12, the same target that Microsoft aims to hit with its Generation 4 data centers.
Mares says he was able to hit these highly efficient levels in part by giving a close look at what a data center truly needs. He writes:
I figured that a PUE of 1.05 was going to take a few years to get to because the hardware needed to improve, i.e. chillers, UPS, transformers, etc. But what I didn't take into account was that when we really look at what the client needs, not wants, and what we can do to design for efficiency without jumping to the same old way of designing a data center, we can reach some great results.
In the post, Mares offers only hints of what innovations he used to get energy efficiency down to this level, but he does lay out that each of the facilities are of average size (10 megawatts of IT load), are in climates with 90-plus degree temperatures in summer, and none use external bodies of water to transfer heat.
Mares also promises to explain further in future posts, so check out his blog for more details.