A team of engineers led by those from The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and drawn from Intel Corp, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Emerson Network Power are spearheading a new system for data center cooling.

In a feat that is a result of some lateral thinking, the team has thought up a system which delivers the optimum amount of cooling to the equipment.

Very simply put, temperature readings from the modern servers feed directly into data center building controls via sensors. Thus the air conditioning system itself keeps the facility in the optimum temperature needed to cool the servers.

So why is this system effective in its beautiful simplicity?
The research team merely wrote software to connect the gap between management systems that otherwise run separately for IT and facilities management. Traditionally speaking, companies have otherwise kept both these realms separate. And now the team has connected up these systems resulting in huge savings.

A big majority – 76% to be precise - of the data centers locate their temperature sensors either on or near their computer room air handlers – aka CRAH units. Even better is what 11% of data centers do – namely placing these sensors in the aisles between the server racks. Of course, this system is not ideal.

The most savings result when these servers are linked up directly into the cooling system itself. Lawrence Berkeley is firmly behind their findings and as their program manager Bill Tschudi states, confidently, most data centers will see a ROI within a year.

This path breaking finding has stemmed from the fact that at least 90% of data centers maintain a temperature 5 degrees cooler than needed. As Allyson Klein a manager at Intel said, “....the idea is that a best data center is a cool data center but we have found it is safe to run them a little bit warmer.”

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