Data Centres and Server Rooms

Rapid progress in the IT sector through increased industrial and transport networking, as well as rocketing numbers of mobile devices, are causing soaring demand for computer performance and the ability to process large data volumes.

The latest wireless standards, IoT applications, hybrid multi-cloud environments and Industry 4.0 are just a few examples of the developments currently impacting data centres and companies of all sizes which operate their own server rooms.

One of the consequences of these developments is a huge rise in energy consumption which is reflected in electricity costs. Studies forecast that, in 2025, data centres will account for one fifth of total global electricity consumption. This makes energy efficiency a key criterion for data centre operators that, with astute planning and organisation, can be turned into a decisive competitive advantage: lower operating costs.

Operators have the following key challenges regarding the cooling of data-centres and server-rooms:

• High availability and operating safety
• Increasing electricity prices
• F-Gas Regulation
• Global warming
• Successive build-up of the thermal loads
• Structural guidelines relating to environmental, fire and water protection, sound pollution etc.

With the eChiller: en route to PUE = 1

Data centre efficiency is measured in terms of power usage effectiveness (PUE). The PUE value is calculated as the coefficient of the data centre’s overall energy consumption and the energy actually used by the IT equipment in the server racks. While a PUE of 1.0 would be ideal, a value of above 2.0 is widespread, meaning that the same amount of energy is consumed for cooling and other processes as for the computing equipment itself. A contributory factor for a high PUE can be inefficient cooling.

The eChiller offers the following benefits for cooling data centres and server rooms

• High efficiency due to fully adjustable, integrated free cooling
• Exempted from F-Gas Regulation
• Highly available refrigerant: water
• High availability due to few moving parts
• Fully visualisable refrigeration circuit via remote monitoring (link: monitoring)
• Predictive maintenance & service (link to predictive maintenance and service)

Cooling capacity that can grow with your data centre

Another major advantage of using the eChiller at your data centre is its flexible adaptability to increasing cooling capacity. The installation at the German bank server room of Sparkassen Calw demonstrates the eChiller’s outstanding energy efficiency, even at part load, and its adaptability to gradually increasing cooling capacity: the load of the eChiller when first taken into operation at this facility was lelow 20 per cent, but steadily increased to full load as the server capacity increased.

Learn more: Job report Sparkassen-IT Calw

Cooling data centres and server rooms with refrigeration systems that use water as a refrigerant has already proven itself as sustainable in several applications, and shown that this can be done safely and economically. In contrast to conventional HFC technologies, no supply bottlenecks or statutory restrictions are to be expected.

Energy efficiency is another area in which the eChiller triumphs significantly over conventional HFC facilities. That’s why refrigeration machines with natural refrigerants are today’s best choice for data centre cooling.