TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Yahoo Weans Off Offsets

Ericka Chickowski | Date: 07-15-09 | Comments

Efficient data center designs and a concerted green effort allow the company to reduce carbon output and save some greenbacks.

Yahoo is replacing carbon offsets with the real deal, company leaders said last week, announcing a corporate initiative that they say will reduce the carbon output of Yahoo's data centers by at least 40 percent over the next five years.

As a part of the big push, Yahoo announced the commencement of a ground-up data center construction project near Buffalo, N.Y., that will leverage patent-pending design and technical elements developed from within the company.

�Our desire is to create some of the most efficient data centers in the world, reduce costs and address the problem of climate change in our own backyard,� says Chris Page, director of climate and energy services for Yahoo.

The company calls the new center the Yahoo Computing Coop due to its uncanny resemblance to a chicken roost, with the central idea behind the design being its ability to make use of ambient air and minimize the necessity for commercial air chillers. As such, Page says the location in nippy climate of upstate New York was a natural fit for the project, especially given the proximity to Niagara Falls and an abundant source of clean hydroelectric power.

She explains that the current design for the Buffalo facility will benefit from lessons learned after completing Yahoo�s first ground-up data center facility in Quincy, Wash., built in 2007.

�[It] runs off almost entirely hydropower, with some wind, and it also runs three quarters of the year off of ambient air,� Page says. �Rather than relying on mechanical air conditioning handling units, we rely on free cooling�we basically open the doors and let the servers be cooled by that. What we discovered then is we have the ability to do some pretty dramatic things in terms of increasing the efficiency of data centers once we designed and operated them.�

Leading data center experts have increasingly advocated for the use of ambient air over the last several years. For example, last year Intel introduced to the industry a proof-of-concept for an air economizer setup that it said had the potential to reduce its power consumption by 74 percent over a 10-month period. In dollars and cents, Intel said the potential savings could equal $2.8 million annually for a 10-megawatt data center using the air economizer to expel hot air outdoors and draw in cool air rather than relying on a localized air conditioner.

In the past, many data center managers have been hesitant to utilize ambient air to chill their data center infrastructure due to air quality fears. But recent research such as Intel�s proof-of-concept has shown that modern servers are capable of running reliably with a higher tolerance for air contamination than once thought.

In Yahoo�s case, the data center in Quincy runs 40 percent to 50 percent more efficient than the average data center. Page says the goal for the Buffalo facility is to reduce the amount of energy necessary for cooling as compared with total energy used from an industry average of 50 percent down to 10 percent.

The Buffalo plan has actually been part of a greater plan to wean Yahoo off of carbon offsets ever since it started buying them in 2007. That was the year Page started at the company, and she says she knew it would take some time to get her bearings and develop a sustainable strategy that would "move the needle" in terms of real energy consumption.

�We wanted to take action right away,� Page says. �So offsets really allowed us to do that while we were measuring and figuring things out.�