As such, the facility is equipped with an extensive Building Management System (BMS), which tracks around 2,000 variables in real time, including the status of the fire protection equipment (zoned detectors, VESDA, and FM200), leak detection system, cooling plant (CRACs, chillers, pumps/inverters), and power infrastructure (branch circuit metering, as well as meters on every outgoing way on main and distribution electrical switchgear, UPS plant and generators).

This level of monitoring has recently had even greater importance attached to it given the upcoming requirements for cap and trade carbon taxes, allowing us to collect data on energy usage (kWh, kW, power factor, voltage, and current) on a per-rack basis, and report this to our customers.

Our Centro datacentre facility has been up and running for nearly 3 months now, so we thought it would be worthwhile doing some analysis on the efficiency of our cooling equipment. We have installed highly efficient Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) units, with electrically commutated (EC) fans, and have also used high efficiency over-sized inverter driven pumps, and high efficiency external packaged chillers with a higher than usual return water temperature, so we were hoping for promising figures.

We’re pleased to announce that our initial analysis shows a PuE figure of 1.63! We are especially happy with this as our current situation with a large number of customers still populating their racks presents several big issues with part-load efficiencies on key plant equipment, particularly UPSs and Chillers.

The Green Grid specify:

Some preliminary work indicates that many datacenters may have a PUE of 3.0 or greater, but with proper design a PUE value of 1.6 should be achievable

We are continuing to improve the systems and processes in place at the Centro facility and hope to make even greater efficiency savings with additional investment in plant in the coming months.

Related Posts

• Centro update – HV transformer installation and chiller pipework connections
• Centro update – FM200, power tray work and air conditioning ducting
• Centro phase 2 fit-out update

Powering the cooling infrastructure within a datacentre is one of the largest components of the operational expenditure related to running these facilities. As such, it’s been very important for us to fully understand the impact that various design options would have on our new Centro datacentre facility.

CFD Model of various rack layouts within Gyron hosting suites

The model above shows a horizontal temperature plane with a number of different rack layouts, cooling technologies, CRAC unit placements, and containment options. As you can see between the right and left hand sides, even very minor things like moving structural columns by a few centimeters can have big knock on effects… and in a lot of cases you can take some quite counter-intuitive steps to actually improve your cooling efficiciency (for example, installing baffles to slow down air flow through some sections of the hosting suites, removing some vented tiles, increasing the target set-point on the cooling management software etc).

In addition, now that we have a model of the facility in the CFD software, we can quickly and cost effectively plan out large customer deployments and verify that higher density rack loads will be cooled effectively before equipment is actually installed. We can even build these models in to our services on a contractual basis to give customers comfort that they will receive what we promise in the sales pitch, and when coupled with thermal imaging and enviromental monitoring built in to our infrastructure can form part of our Service Level Agreements.

Related Posts

• Centro phase 2 fit-out update
• Centro update – Final air conditioning works
• Centro update – HV transformer installation and chiller pipework connections