2010-02-01

Fima installing most power-efficient data centre in Eastern and Central Europe

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Currently, Fima is installing a data centre for the company Baltic Data Centre that will employ an innovating technology to cool the servers, using the temperature of the “free-of-chargeg” outside air rather than freon -based systems with their enormous thirst for electricity. This solution will allow cutting the power consumption down by as much as 8 times. No such technology has been deployed in any other Eastern and Central European country yet.

“With the quantities of data growing faster, the capacities of data centres are increasing as well and they consume an increasing amount of power. In Lithuania, the rising prices of electrical power also add to the growing costs. Hence, one has to look for power-efficient solutions while installing new data centres,” says Valdas Vrubliauskas, the director of the Data Transmission Solutions Department of the company Fima.

In his words, server cooling systems are the biggest energy consumers and may account for up to 50 per cent of total energy consumed by a data centre. However, a new cooling system KyotoCooling has been recently patented and commissioned in the Netherlands. The system uses the temperature of the outside air and therefore needs a lot less power.

“With this cooling system in place, the fans “take” cool ambient air and “transfer” it to the heat wheel. The temperature of the outside air cools it along with the entire server room. The system runs based on this principle as long as the ambient temperature is below 22 degrees Celsius, thenceforth conventional cooling solutions kick in,” Vrubliauskas says.

The KyotoCooling system will considerably reduce the cost to manage the data centre as in this case the power consumption rate is up to 8 times lower. According to an estimate, to cool a 350 kW server the KyotoCooling system uses 35 kW of power in average. A freon-based system that is normally used to cool data centres would consume 240 kW of energy.

The KyotoCooling technology has been deployed only in two Dutch companies so far and is being integrated in several companies in the US.