Template:Tidy is Green

From Lauraibm

Full article: Tidy Data Centres are Green Data Centres

Surprisingly low-tech innovations are the secret to success for some of the world's greenest data centres.

Cabling is often the last thing on a data centre manager's mind and as a result the under-floor cabling in many server farms is so untidy that it blocks the channels used to distribute cool air, forcing the air conditioning units to work even harder, driving up both energy use and electricity bills. IBM's Integrated Rack Solution integrates the cabling into the server racks, and neatly bundles cables together to ensure they pose minimal disruption to the all important air flow.

Data centre managers have long known that keeping the front of the server racks cool is critical to their reliability and availability and as a result they have typically alternated cold corridors -- where cold air is pumped into a corridor with sets server racks facing inwards -- with hot corridors -- where the hot air is exhausted from the back of the racks and extracted from the data centre. However, hot air rises and as a result the warm air from the "exhaust" corridor typically "leaks" back over the top of the racks into the cold corridor. As a result the servers housed at the top of the racks are considerably less reliable than those at the bottom and the air-conditioning units once again have to work harder to keep the temperature down.

IBM's response to the problem? Stick a glass roof and door on the cold corridor. Consequently, the hot air is kept away from the front of the servers, as illustrated, and the air conditioning units not only have to cool a far smaller area but are able to do so without warm air seeping into cold corridor.

IBM reckons that combining these two relatively simple approaches can slash the energy used to cool a data centre by up to 50%.