Rapid progress in the IT sector through increased industrial and transport networking, as well as rocketing numbers of mobile devices, are causing soaring demand for computer performance and the ability to process large data volumes.
The latest wireless standards, IoT applications, hybrid multi-cloud environments and Industry 4.0 are just a few examples of the developments currently impacting data centres and companies of all sizes which operate their own server rooms.
One of the consequences of these developments is a huge rise in energy consumption which is reflected in electricity costs. Studies forecast that, in 2025, data centres will account for one fifth of total global electricity consumption. This makes energy efficiency a key criterion for data centre operators that, with astute planning and organisation, can be turned into a decisive competitive advantage: lower operating costs.
Operators have the following key challenges regarding the cooling of data-centres and server-rooms:
Data centre efficiency is measured in terms of power usage effectiveness (PUE). The PUE value is calculated as the coefficient of the data centre’s overall energy consumption and the energy actually used by the IT equipment in the server racks. While a PUE of 1.0 would be ideal, a value of above 2.0 is widespread, meaning that the same amount of energy is consumed for cooling and other processes as for the computing equipment itself. A contributory factor for a high PUE can be inefficient cooling.
Another major advantage of using the eChiller at your data centre is its flexible adaptability to increasing cooling capacity. The installation at the German bank server room of Sparkassen Calw demonstrates the eChiller’s outstanding energy efficiency, even at part load, and its adaptability to gradually increasing cooling capacity: the load of the eChiller when first taken into operation at this facility was lelow 20 per cent, but steadily increased to full load as the server capacity increased.
