Google banks on data center with no chillers

Google has taken a radical new approach when it comes to cooling data centers. The search giant has opened a unique data center in Belgium that has no backup chillers installed, but instead relies totally upon free air cooling to keep its servers cool.

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Cooling is one of the most pressing concerns for data center managers currently, as the equipment required to cool a data center consumes power, and thus impacts on both operational costs and efficiencies. The importance of cooling was starkly illustrated recently when a cooling failure occurred inside a London based data center, caused the servers belong to the music service Spotify to collapse because of the heat.

Chillers effectively refrigerate water and are commonly used in data centers. However, they require a large amount of electricity to operate. Many data center operators are now looking to use the free air cooling that can be achieved from the natural environment. Yahoo for example recently unveiled a new data center in New York that utilises a chicken coop design that makes use of louvre (or horizontal slates) walls to allow free cold air to flow into the area housing the computer equipment.

Usually sites of this nature would have chillers in place to act as backup cooling for warm days. But the Yahoo site, like the Google data center in Belgium, has no chillers at all to cool the center, but instead it relies totally on fresh air.

According to Data Center Knowledge website, the Google site near Saint-Ghislain, Belgium hopes to make local weather forecasting a large factor in its data center management strategy.

Google's Saint-Ghislain site began operation back in late 2008 and apparently the climate in that region of Europe will support free cooling almost year-round. Google's engineers believe the outside temperatures will only rise above the acceptable range for free cooling about seven days per year on average.

Google is thought to operate its data centers at around 26 C, with average temperatures in that region during summer months reaching between 18.8 to 21.6 C.

When the weather does get hot, Google will effectively switch off equipment at the center and instead transfer computing workloads to other data centers.

Some cloud experts have speculated whether this ability to shift workloads from data center to data center will result in "follow the moon" energy management strategies, whereby organisations take advantage of lower power and cooling costs by only using data centers at night time, rather than during the day.

But the free air cooling concept and the lack of a controlled climate within a data center does have its doubters. e-shelter, which develops and operates its own data centers recently told Techworld that most businesses would not be prepared to accept the inherent risks in this approach.

It cites the danger of a fire upwind of the data center site, because smoke particulates can cause havoc with hard disk drives. Another issue concerns dampness from heavy humidity, which can cause electrical problems.