Design Notes

One of the mechanical companies quoting us for our air-side economizer suggested another option. He suggested we feed cold air into the intake of our large Liebert A/C unit. This way, the Liebert would handle air flow to the cold side of our cabinets and the compressors will only turn on when the economizer is off. Not a bad idea...

FYI, I've opened up comments on this blog for people that have advise, comments or overall ideas to share on what we're doing. Thanks.

Welcome!

To run a data center, you not only need a great amount of power, you also need a great amount of cooling. It is easy to forget that cooling is half, if not more, of the power expense at a data center. Red Rocks Data Center's unique location provides a variety of ways we can reduce and even eliminate the use of air conditioning systems.

The goal of a air-side economizer is to take advantage of the cool outside air to cool the data center servers. For more information on a air-side economizer, here is a good article.

Our goals for implementing this system are as follows:

1. Reduce the amount of time during the year when our main Liebert A/C runs
2. Become more environmental friendly in the process
3. Replicate this design throughout other parts of our data center in addition to future expansion buildings
4. Publish/share in detail our findings, designs and implementation of our system
5. Create a "dashboard" webpage that shows in real time the status of the economizer, outside air temperature, kilowatt usage from the A/C unit,etc.. this will detail out the effectiveness of the economizer

With the average temperature in the Denver area less than 70 degrees 9 months out of the year, our location is ideal for cooling our data center with outside air.

We started with an initial design which can be found here. From here, we've invited numerous mechanical companies to come in and bid on our project. Very soon, we'll be under way and this blog will be filled with pictures, commentary and a play-by-play of the process.

-Stay tuned.....