Commercial Architecture June 2017 - 24

PROJECT

hvac

Modular Approach Curbs Data Center Energy Use
Using small modular cooling blocks that can be scaled to
actual IT use results in 90% energy efficiency.

ata centers are a lynchpin of our modern economy. Keeping up
with the explosive growth of digital content, big data, e-commerce, and Internet traffic is making these facilities one of the

fastest growing consumers of electricity in developed countries.
Data-center power consumption is on the rise, increasing 56% worldwide and 36% in the United States from 2005 to 2013. In fact, data centers
use nearly 2% of the world's supply of electricity at any given time, and
37% of that amount is used to keep computing equipment cool. Not only
is this a drain on the power grid, but it also taxes water supplies. A 15-MW
data center can use as much as 360,000 gal. of water/day-that's more than
half the water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
ENERGY SOLUTIONS

Aligned Energy, Danbury, CT, an integrated technology platform, has
developed a solution that eliminates infrastructure complexity and waste,
heightens visibility and control, and improves reliability in data centers.
One of Aligned Energy's subsidiary companies, Inertech, set out to address
the key drivers of cost in data centers:

* over-building a data center
* underusing an existing data center
* using cooling technology inefficiently.
With 80% of a data center's costs going toward the electrical and mechanical systems, Inertech teams determined that the only way to effect
real change was to drive down the cost of a center's cooling system and
electrical blocks.
Using the Danfoss, Baltimore, portfolio of products and application
expertise, Inertech personnel were able to develop a solution that scales
mechanical and energy infrastructure directly to servers and storage use,
which has yielded significant savings in water and electricity costs.
The majority of a data center's upfront costs are in building chiller infrastructure. The average data center is constructed to a "perceived build,"
based on the anticipated IT capacity. Companies try to predetermine the
size of chiller plants needed to support IT. However, these calculations are
highly complex and difficult to accurately predict. Often, companies significantly overbuild data centers, unnecessarily inflating their capital costs.
Operators of existing data centers, working under this energy-capacity
model, were spending nearly 85% of their capital expense upfront. These
operators would start up their IT kits only to learn that the total system

Top. Data centers use nearly 2% of the world's supply of electricity at any given time, and
37% of that amount is used to keep computing equipment cool.
Left. Inertech's approach to cooling and water usage reduces data-center startup costs by as
much as 85% and results in chiller-plant efficiencies of 80% to 90%.

COMMERCI A L A RCHI T EC T URE

JUNE 2017

commercialarchitecturemagazine.com

http://www.commercialarchitecturemagazine.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Commercial Architecture June 2017