An experiment conceived and conducted by two enterprising Intel employees in Rio Rancho [New Mexico] has shown how businesses worldwide could drastically reduce the amount of electricity they use to cool essential computer systems.
It works the same way as rolling down a car window to let in cool air. Instead of using a power-hungry air conditioning to combat the heat generated by hundreds of densely packed computer servers, Don Atwood and John Miner created a ventilation system that draws in cool air from outside and allows heated air to escape.
A data center is the place where companies concentrate computer servers critical to running their business. Intel has about 5,000 servers located in six data centers at its Rio Rancho plant. They are kept cool by air conditioning systems, which require a constant supply of about 10-megawatts of electricity.
A megawatt is enough power to supply about 500 to 700 average homes under normal conditions, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
Businesses worldwide use similar cooling technology. The cost of power to run the air conditioning can amount to about 70 percent of a data center’s operational costs, Atwood and Miner said.
Their air-cooling experiment showed how the data center can operate safely and reliably using less than half the power consumed by traditional cooling designs.
They say that would mean lower power costs, resulting in fewer carbon-emissions and less mechanical maintenance.
“It opens the door to a lot of scenarios,” Atwood said in an interview on Friday.
With lower cooling costs, companies could increase the size of data centers — something Intel intends to do. The computer chip manufacturer is planning to cut the number of data centers worldwide from 100 to 8, two of those will be in the U.S., one in Rio Rancho and…