As the UK finally starts to enjoy the summer with higher temperatures and higher humidity, how efficiently is your data centre being cooled?

Ark that supply our data centres, has been deploying direct air cooled data centres for the last three years and it is interesting to see how they are performing in our current weather conditions.

Well, to quote from that famous wood stain and paint company … they do exactly what it says on the tin.

The graphs below show the outside air temperature and relative humidity (RH) for earlier this week (30^th June). It shows that as the temperature rose during the day to 28^oC and RH ranged from 30% to over 85%, the conditioned air delivered to the IT remained at 22.6^oC +/- 0.8 and RH between 35% and 60%.

So what you may ask… that’s what a data centre is supposed to do.  But, the important question is how efficient and economical was the cooling.

Well there is not much more efficient that an Ark direct air-cooled data centre. The modular data centre system dynamically matches cooling and airflow to actual IT demand and this means that PUE (yes … that old metric) remains consistently low whether the data centre is partially or fully loaded with racks.

On the 30^th June, the data centres used no mechanical cooling whatsoever utilising free cooling for the whole day i.e. no DX was deployed. In boring PUE terms, Ark achieved 1.13 during the day meaning that 130kW of cooling was used for every 1MW of IT load… now go and ask your data centre manager what your reported results were for Tuesday… Even if your provider has fixed your cooling, if it is greater than the Ark number then there is a financial and carbon cost to someone somewhere!

A Crown Hosting Data Centres solution will drive financial and carbon savings to your organisation through reduced energy consumption…whatever the weather.

Jason Liggins