Burning up: Mitigation should sustain datacentre operations during extreme heat

Raymond Ma, general manager for Europe, Australia and New Zealand at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, maintains that conventional, older datacentres can be “incredibly inefficient”. Standard air-conditioning can eat up 40% of the total energy bill, resulting in a huge environmental impact.

Innovation remains important, including looking at advanced immersion or water cooling technologies, with redesigns of conventional centres requiring planning around reconstruction of the infrastructure, preparation of specially designed IT, coolant selection, and mechanisation of monitoring and maintenance systems.

“This can deliver costless cooling for 90% of a datacentre’s operating time, driving down energy consumption by more than 80% compared to mechanical cooling,” says Ma. “Adopt industry best practices, such as using intelligent algorithms to increase energy efficiency, enhancing renewable electricity use and boosting the recycling of energy such as waste heat generated by servers.”

Richard Clifford, solutions head at UK-based Keysource, warns there is no silver bullet for better management of soaring temperatures. ldquo;The key is the design and strategy for dealing with higher ambient temperatures, focusing on cooling and IT load, which means reducing the load in line with reduced cooling performance,” he says. “Cooler climates have several benefits, but climate change is global.”

He says a “vast majority” of UK datacentres already operate below 80% of design capacity. They should be able to manage these rising temperatures currently, with appropriate attention paid to proper maintenance, resilience, airflow and capacity planning around resources, including power and, increasingly, water.

James Petter, vice-president of international sales at Pure Storage, prescribes solutions that can flex up and down, based on data-driven insights. He broadly agrees that capacity planning will likely benefit from more innovation and sustainable tech purchasing, because every item uses energy, even if it doesn’t produce any heat while operating.

For instance, solar may power more datacentres in future, with variable power draws backed up by an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). This could mean greater ability to cope with volatile weather patterns exacerbated by an overall hotter climate.

Coupled with data reduction and compression, racks of the future should consume less power and require less cooling. “I think it’s going to go to nanotechnology,” says Petter.

Steve Wright, chief operating officer at UK-based 4D Data Centres, reiterates that the outages and facility impacts seen this summer have been a tiny subset of the UK’s 400 or so commercial datacentres – and at least one outage appears to have involved an accidental rerouting.

“Those impacts probably shouldn’t have happened. However, the reality is that people need to learn that cloud isn’t this magical thing that is just always there 24/7,” he says. “You need a strategy for how you deal with not being able to access your internal IT asset or online service.”

For that reason, he looks forward to deeper investigation of what happened with the latest hot weather issues. Datacentre operators should keep asking what can be learnt as a separate, independent entity targeting greater stability and resilience – with skillsets also relevant.

Wright underlines the sense of trying to learn from and benefit from the experiences of datacentre operators already working in much hotter or humid environments. Improvements around maintenance are still needed, and a lot of retrofitting and mitigation is still possible.

“Maybe 10 to 15 years ago, you could fit a few chillers in between the buildings and get away with the cooling infrastructure being in the car park,” says Wright.

It can be as simple as just putting less load in the area that needs to run cooler, he adds.

“Probably the biggest thing is the elements of the ambient air design condition. I suspect we’ll start working to 43ºC to 44ºC, maybe 45ºC, in future,” he says.

“The ASHRAE [American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers] operating window for server equipment has got wide over 15 years or so, but we’re still working on pushing that even higher. Actually, we can cool down to 25ºC (rather than 16-18ºC), which still feels quite warm in the UK but you can still push that higher.”