What does the future hold for data centre cooling?

Facebook's data centre in Prineville, Oregon

As Westpac Bank recently proved, data centre cooling is serious business. The bank made headlines after an air conditioning outage at its data facilities pulled down automatic teller machines (ATMs) and EFTPOS facilities for hours.

At the time, data centre specialist and the director of Adelaide-based Computer Site Solutions, Mike Lockett, said the incident was a timely reminder for Australian businesses to review their data centre’s capacity to cope with a fault.

“It's vital data centres have additional power and cooling that can be utilised if one of the air conditioning units or power sources fail,” Lockett said in a statement.

However, data centre cooling isn't just a question of preventing outages: Rising electricity costs and the need to reduce data centres' carbon footprints are of increasing importance

The Federal Government’s plan to impose a carbon tax from 1 July next year is expected to have impacts ranging from a $300 increase a year for households to a doubling depending on the supplier — and for power-hungry data centres the tax may have a substantial impact on operators' bottom lines.

Gartner Australia research vice-president, Phil Sargeant, says that data centre managers and organisations will be forced to look at energy management in a way they haven’t in the past. For example, installing energy management systems to control power and cooling and cut power requirements. Data centres would also move to use new hardware capable of running in warmer air.

For some, it’s merely a matter of turning down the dial on the air con.

“I’ve visited some data centres in Australia and they are very cold,” he said. “Data centres can now accommodate higher temperatures and the offset is you don’t have to use as much air conditioning.”

Gartner’s chief of research for infrastructure, David Cappuccio, recently noted that traditional data centre designs date back to the 1980s and 1990s. Demands on mechanical and electrical systems from new systems mean new designs were needed.

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