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One of the key advantages of having a data centre in Northern Europe is that fresh air cooling can be used all year round as our temperate climate is ideal for a combination of free cooling and evaporative cooling. Not only can this result in huge energy savings when compared to refrigerant based alternatives but 99% ASHRAE class one compliancy can be achieved, making it the ideal solution for both new build and retrofit data centres and server rooms.

How does it work

Direct free cooling exploits low external temperatures by utilising outside air to cool the data centre. On hotter days, the natural process of evaporative cooling can be used to lower the air temperature. Careful use of filtration to remove gaseous particulates and controlled air mixing to ensure constant temperatures allows fresh air technologies to be used for the cooling of the majority of IT equipment.

Why now?

The adoption of free cooling has recently increased, with many of the hyperscalers implementing fresh air-cooling technologies into their facilities, with great success. This adoption at the larger end of the market and the large energy savings has driven a demand for smaller facilities wanting to exploit the energy saving and cost saving associated with free cooling. Additionally government attention on the power draw to data centres has increased pressure on the industry to look at ways to reduce overall power consumption.

Boden Type DC One – The world’s most cost-efficient data centre project – Funded by the European Union H2020 scheme.

EcoCooling have been working as part of a pan-European H2020 funded project to prototype a cost and energy efficient data centre model for IT facilities. The project is driven towards the holistic approach to data centre design and management and is currently achieving world class results, with PUEs of under 1.02 being achieved the majority of the time.

The project team have built a facility where the IT equipment and cooling system can be optimised to reduce energy use while maintaining uptime and compute power. Consortium partners have introduced a number of different scenarios to testing including the predicted load of smart cities and IoT based IT demands. The research and optimisation have allowed EcoCooling to develop their cutting-edge control system, allowing their modular products to achieve world leading efficiencies for data centres from 15kW to 50MW in size.

Why EcoCooling?

Our applications department has supplied cooling systems for over 1000 data centre and telco operations including BT, Hydro66, TalkTalk, Cap Gemini with the majority achieving PUEs of below 1.1. If you are interested in discussing how to incorporate fresh air and free cooling into your data centre and achieve the huge cost savings associated with this established technology, contact us today for a free site survey.

“The system works terrifically well for our new London Central data centre. It’s cost effective, very easy to install, and now functions excellently not only as an incredibly effective cooling system, but also as a real-world exercise in the dramatic reduction of operational costs.”

Matthew Butt
Managing Director Netwise Hosting

More info on EcoCooling’s CloudCooler range of data centre cooling products can be found here