Google’s Chiller-less Data Center
Google (GOOG) has begun operating a data center in Belgium that has no chillers to support its cooling systems, a strategy that will improve its energy efficiency while making local weather forecasting a larger factor in its data center management.
Kudos to Data Center Knowledge for bringing this to my attention. The story speaks for itself, so I’ll limit my comments to highlighting a few things that I found very interesting.
Google maintains its data centers at temperatures above 80 degrees.
Most data centers are kept below 80 degrees. Co-Lo facilities speak of keeping temperatures below 70 degrees. Google has an advantage over other large companies: among other things their equipment is much more uniform so airflow and other temperature management issues are less complex to manage.
Co-Lo facilities probably have to keep things cooler than corporate data centers because their tenants often won’t use best practices in provisioning for air flow and other factors such as highly heterogeneous hardware use.
At last month’s Structure 09 conference, Google’s Vijay Gill hinted that the company has developed automated tools to manage data center heat loads and quickly redistribute workloads during thermal events (a topic covered by The Register).
Google has had a head start here, and this is an area where the major vendors are playing catch-up. Most current hardware management tools now include power and temperature monitoring as standard features and we’re starting to see performance tuning for power and heat appear in the administrator console as a standard feature. This trend will undoubtedly continue as components become more manageable for energy use.
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