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Experimental infrastructure will start at 75 degrees and potentially run at up to 80.6, thanks to sensor technology.
What's the operating temperature in your data center? How much are you spending on cooling? Computerworld reports on a new IBM facility that will rely on outside air for much of its cooling and run the racks hotter than usual, cutting down on energy costs.
IBM has opened a football field-size data center in North Carolina it says will rely heavily on outside air for cooling as it turns up the heat inside, gradually.
This new data center, about 60,000 square-feet in the Research Triangle Park N.C., incorporates IBM's latest approaches to energy. It includes thousands of sensors that dynamically monitor temperature, humidity, air flow and circuits all of which is integrated into the building's management and IT systems. The data center will be supporting cloud platforms.
"What we tried to do here is have a data center that is more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent than anything we have done before," said Joe Dzaluk, IBM's vice president of infrastructure and resource management at the Global Technology Services division. The data center will use about 6 MWs of power initially, but is designed to be expanded to 100,000 square feet and 15 MWs.
Among the things the company is doing to reduce energy usage is to adopt latest environmental recommendations by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, which allow the temperature for data center equipment from the old recommendation of 77 degrees Fahrenheit to 80.6, reflecting improvements in equipment design.
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