Update

It's been a long time since we updated this blog, sorry for the delay.

We've been successfully cooling our data center using cool mountain air since November of 2008. During the Fall and Winter months, our savings are averaging about $1600 a month on a $5000 total bill. (would be $6600+).

Unlike some naysayers who warned of mass hard disk failure and 5" of dust in the servers, we've had nothing but smooth sailing.

One thing we did notice when trying to gain some media attention was that nobody really cared about cooling with outside air. Colorado's Governor Ridder's office initially showed interest and even mentioned they might want to come visit but quickly ignored my reminder emails when sexier projects that cost more and provide a greatly reduced payback such as solar surfaced.

Even though you hear of more and more data centers looking towards this option, you will never see any elected official using our facility for a photo-op because I guess there isn't much to show.

We are still very proud of what we've accomplished here and will continue to realize the tremendous advantages using an air-side economizer to cool our data center.

Thanks for all that have been following our project, please continue to contact us with questions.

-Tom Nats
Managing Partner
Red Rocks Data Center

Article on Air-Side Economizers

Here is a great article on air-side economizers: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m5PRB/is_12_49/ai_n25125555/?tag=content;col1

(click on the photo to enlarge it)

Not many data centers in the country do you get the opportunity to see wildlife on a daily basis. This is often our view as we go about our daily business and this was the case this afternoon on a beautiful Colorado day. No asphalt, no concrete, no cars, no freeway,etc..

Won't you come join us?

p.s. no feeding the deer..

Another picture of our facility. (the dishes are gone now, recycled as they were mostly aluminum)

Cluster Update

We've finished up the build out of our heat containment wall which currently houses a customer's Dell 128 node cluster with master nodes and NAS storage. The room is currently cooled by 2ea. 3-ton Sun A/C units with air-side economizers. The 2nd unit is actually a backup so the entire room is currently being cooled by one 3-ton unit. It's been using 100% outside air with no compressor except for today when the temperature reached near 75 degrees.


Here are some photos. Notice the 4 blue racks on the left. These are for future customers and the wall to the left of those cabinets was built to be easily removed so racks will fill the entire row except for the doors.




The neat thing is if you go to http://dell.com/calc and put in 3-3/4 racks of PowerEdge 1950 III 3.5" drives, you will see it requires 14.2 tons of cooling. We're doing it with 3 tons (a 3 ton as a backup) saving a TON on A/C power. It's time to shake up the industry a bit and think outside of the box. I invite other data center managers both in the private and public sector to schedule a visit, we would love to show you the details.

I'm posting our initial Visio diagram of our final plan for this room.

Sun using economizers..

Down the street from us, it looks like they realized the cost savings as we have.
http://tinyurl.com/b5ztpw

Pics

Pics of our new build out can be found here:
http://redrocksdatacenter.com/gallery/v/tierra/

Next project...

We've been chosen by Tierra Geophysical to provide a home to their new Dell cluster. This cluster contains 128 "nodes" which are actually 1U Dell servers. To cool this extreme amount of heat, we've decided to think outside the box much like we did with our Trane economizer.

The plan is to "contain" the over 38,000watts of heat being produced by all of these 1U servers and exhaust it outside. You might ask, well, great idea...but where will you get the make up air to supply to the servers..???? We thought you might ask that..

Below is the initial design of this room. As you can see, 3 existing A/C units will supply the air flow needed for this cluster. These units were already equipped with air-side economizers which will use outside air 100% of the year. The reason for this is because it will be easier to cool outside air than very hot server air which is usually greater than 105 degrees.

Since our new customer is going to be paying their own power bills, we estimate that using a 100% economizer approach will save them $900+ a month.




Once the project is completed, we'll post pictures of the results.