Google to Data Centers: Raise the Thermostat
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 10.15.08
Hotter Data Center to Save Power
It's been quite mediatized in the past few years that data centers use a lot of power, a good portion of which is used to cool them down. New technologies are being used to save power, including consolidation and virtualization of servers and fancy sensors, but sometimes the low-tech approach works best: Simply raise the thermostat. That's what Google is doing.
Read on for more details.
Notice the solar panels on the roof of the Googleplex.
Google: Raise Your Data Center Temperature
Erik Teetzel, an Energy Program Manager at Google, said:
“The guidance we give to data center operators is to raise the thermostat. Many data centers operate at 70 degrees or below. We’d recommend looking at going to 80 degrees.”
Most data centers operate in a temperature range between 68 and 72 degrees, and some are as cold as 55 degrees. Savings can be calculated with this rule of thumb (according to Mark Monroe of Sun Microsystems): "Data center managers can save 4 percent in energy costs for every degree of upward change".
So going from 70 degrees to 80 degrees could, in theory, mean a 40% saving in cooling energy costs (though real-world results might vary from place to place).
Of course, there are downsides to increasing the temps. If there's a cooling failure, you have less time to recover before the equipment is damaged. But there are technical solutions to this, such as making cooling systems more robust and having better sensors to detect problems early.
Questions Accepted Beliefs about Data Center Cooling
Even more interesting is this study by Intel:
Intel recently conducted a 10-month test to evaluate the impact of using only outside air (also known as air-side economization) to cool a high-density data center in New Mexico, where the temperature ranged from 64 degrees to as high as 92 degrees. Intel said it found “no consistent increase” in failure rates due to the greater variation in temperature and humidity. “This suggests that existing assumptions about the need to closely regulate these factors bear further scrutiny,” Intel concluded.
One thing is certain, high energy costs are changing the data center world and making it more efficient and greener. Not a moment too soon.
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Is that Intel study real? Could this mean that a lot of energy has been wasted keeping data centers much too cold?
Why not try to raise it a degree or two and see if performance suffers. If all is well, raise it a little more.
why'd dont they build data centers in minnesota or north dakota where its cold half the year and they can just fan in the ambient air that is below freezing to cool the centers?
The Intel study compared a data centre spilt in two. One air conditioned and the other outside air cooled.
The air cooled side did suffer a higher failure rate of equipment but less than one percent.
I'm assuming that's in degrees Celcius (since most of the world uses that scale), right ?
Great article. We need more public heat on Google and the energy hogs. I live in Portland, close to a google data center built near a dam where an energy hog aluminum plant shut down. Intel friends told me my home computer could run great even when the internal sensor reads 130F. I removed the CPU fan and installed a heat sink. The result is less noise, less power wasted, same performance. If my home server can do it for 2 years, so should Google and all data centers. If there are blackouts or brown outs the equipment can be programmed to cope.
There was no 'public heat' on this one. For any company which operates on the scale of Google, such savings make for huge gains.
In terms of the low failure rate. It is hard to argue that any failure rate above 0 is good for many different reasons, but the first reason I'll suggest is pollution. As articles on this site have shown, 'recycling electronics' really means let impoverished workers do the dirty and deadly work.
A few megawatts of power is a fair trade for sparing a human life IMHO.
All of this being said, there are significant strides being made on all sides to reduce energy consumption and capture 'waste heat'.
In this particular case Google is pushing not only to use less energy for AC but also avoid pollution from hardware failure. Attaboy Google!