Energy Advantages of Containment Systems
The Uptime Institute estimates that the cost to build a new 20,000 square foot Tier 3 data center – a facility with less than 1.6 hours of downtime a year – is around US$26 million. However, due to changes in the global economy, funds for new data center construction are increasingly difficult to obtain, even as business demands on IT are increasing.
Improved cooling techniques are essential to extend the life of existing data center facilities. The use of containment – a method of separating supply (cold) and return (hot) air to more effectively cool the IT equipment in a data center -- ensures that room and equipment temperatures can be better managed. Containment allows for a reduction in cooling-related energy, much of which can be redeployed into either increasing the amount of IT equipment in the data center or refreshing older systems for more powerful and energy efficient IT equipment. Coupled with other techniques, containment can provide data centers with an energy reduction of greater than 20%.
This paper presents data and analysis of a chilled water facility. A chilled water facility was chosen because it is easier to separately measure energy associated with the movement of air from energy associated with the chilling process. Overall facility efficiencies would be different for direct expansion (DX) equipment, but the improvement percentage estimates presented in this paper should be comparable.