Tag Archive for 'air conditioning'

Early on in the design stage for our new Centro datacentre, we recognised the importance of in depth monitoring, reporting and trending capabilities across the entire facility, both for troubleshooting and early warning purposes, and for analysing efficiency data.

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.