Data center structural equipment manufacturer Chatsworth Products (chatsworth.com) along with Uptime Technology (uptimetechnology.nl) not long ago has unveiled a solution that solves the problem of data center equipment cooling at this year's Power and Cooling Summit in London, UK. The solution revealed how to reduce electrical usage and decrease the carbon footprint for cooling data centers by over 80 percent while providing a means to air cool power densities four to five times higher than previously claimed possible. Ian Seaton, CPI's thermal expert and R.M. Lodder of Uptime Technology, presented this solution during the green workshop, "An Energy Saving Strategy for Cooling High Density Green Data Centers."

Seaton began the workshop by stressing the need to make a paradigm shift from regarding server cabinets as enclosures for storing servers, to identifying them as the central architectural feature of the data center for securing isolation between the room's cold air and hot exhaust air. Seaton then went on to outline the economic and cooling performance benefits of this isolation, including being able to cost-effectively air-cool cabinet heat loads in excess of 20 kW and having the ability to raise the computer room HVAC supply temperature from a typical 55 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit.

Lodder then explained how Kyoto Cooling technology can translate this higher supply temperature into energy savings with dramatically higher levels of reliability. Kyoto Cooling utilizes outside air temperatures as the cooling source for the data center, during hours when the outside temperature is less than the data center supply air temperature requirement. This provides free cooling, except for the nominal expense of running a small number of high efficiency air movers.

Seaton and Lodder will be sharing their experiences again with these revolutionary cooling techniques during the Kyoto Cooling Seminar (kyotocooling.com/KyotoCooling%20Seminars.html#re) and site tour on November 28 and 29 at the Kyoto Cooling test data center in the Netherlands.