PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
What if you could build a data center from scratch?
While companies everywhere are scrambling to make over their data centers to squeeze out every watt of electrical power, Power Loft, a venture-capital-backed data center builder and operator, has the luxury of designing new data centers from the ground up.
“We are done retrofitting,” says Jim Coakley, president and CEO of Power Loft, based in McLean, Va. “We’re only building from the ground up. There’s no way we could get to the same level of efficiency” by making over an existing facility.
Data centers—and all buildings for that matter—are built according to a set of assumptions that are valid at the time of construction, but might not apply a decade or two later. As recently as 2005, according to Coakley, data centers were constructed with the expectation that one rack of equipment would consume 1 kilowatt of electrical power. Now, because more computing power is being crammed onto each microprocessor, the expected energy consumption is 6 to 8 kilowatts per rack, he says. And looking into the future, Coakley sees a 20-kilowatt rack on the horizon.
For more on data center, waste, click here.
“With every uptick in power, they had to go into pristine data centers and rip them up to take out racks and put in more air-conditioning units,” he explains. “That’s what we set out to resolve.”
According to Power Loft, the solution is a two-story building
with a first floor that’s 27 feet high and a second story that’s 21 feet tall.
The jumbo first story houses
air-conditioning and electrical equipment, while the second story is reserved
exclusively for IT equipment.
The arrangement yields a 25 percent increase in floor space available for computing and storage equipment. A Power Loft data center can handle 50 percent more racks and 100 percent more power per rack than most data centers, which is important when servers are virtualized, Coakley says.
The AHUs (air handling units) on the ground floor are 25 percent more efficient than conventional CRACs (computer room air conditioners). Fine-tuned management of air exhaust and intake, using the building shell rather than separate ductwork, yields another 12 percent in energy savings.
Next to the main Power Loft building are two smaller structures, housing a total of 33 diesel generators. With DC electrical power being touted as a superior alternative to AC power, the data centers are constructed with the ability to convert to DC should that be necessary. Overall, a Power Loft data center uses 70 percent less power than a conventional data center, yielding a saving of $8 million per year, according to Coakley.
Although Power Loft is not putting green IT concerns at the top of its priority list, thanks to federal economic stimulus funds the company may put a 1-megawatt photovoltaic solar array on its first data center, located in Prince William County, Va. The company has a second data center on the drawing board to be located in San Antonio.
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