Green House Data has partnered with mechanical and electrical engineering firm Deerns America for both their expertise in green data center design and for their patented Green Cooling for Data Centers (GC-DC) air conditioning technology. This energy efficient data center will operate at levels 75 percent more efficient than the typical data center, according to the Uptime Institute survey in May 2011.

Set to open its doors in the first quarter of 2013, the new 25,000-sq-ft facility will utilize year round 100 percent free cooling. The air conditioning technology has been custom designed by Deerns America and when combined with the data center’s overall efficiency will allow the Green House Data facility to run at an annual average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.16 and a peak PUE of 1.22.

“This progressive step is an exciting advancement for our company adding additional data center space utilizing energy efficient 100 percent free cooling,” stated Shawn Mills, president of Green House Data. “I see the increasing demand for low-energy cooling systems, green technologies and efficiencies as an avenue to reduce utility costs and offer these savings to our clients in this competitive industry.”

100 Percent Free Cooling System Design

The innovative cooling combines proven technologies in a new application that can serve up to 40 kW of IT load per rack. Within each unit, outdoor air is drawn through a plate heat exchanger where it absorbs heat from the IT room’s hot return air.  It is then cooled and re-circulated through the data center. By separating the air streams in this way, the outside air can be cooled evaporatively without influencing the humidity in the white space and without risk of contamination from dust, smoke, pollen, and other particulates. Even as outdoor air temperatures rise, evaporative coolers will provide low-energy supplemental cooling without requiring the use of refrigeration based cooling systems.

The proprietary cooling design removes the need for under floor plenums as the units can deliver cool air directly to the computer floor, which is optimal for Green House Data’s use of hot, and/or cold aisle containment. Additionally, the cooling system can seamlessly grow along with Green House Data’s modular data center building design as new units can be added as needed.

“With the cool, dry geographical location selection chosen by Green House Data, implementing our free cooling system will have a great impact on energy efficiency,” stated Gary Cudmore, principal of data center engineering for Deerns America. “Additionally, the GC-DC system we’ve developed for this project will provide a data center environment complying with ASRHAE TC 9.9 guidelines without the need for expensive, energy-intensive chillers.”

The building features include:

• 25,000-sq-ft building (15,000 sq ft of data center white space)
• 700 data cabinets (29,400 physical servers)
• Tier 3 – concurrently maintainable
• 4.5 MW – Critical IT load (5.7KW/cabinet)
• 45% more energy efficient data center design, when compared to the typical data center.
• Year-round free cooling
• 100% Wind powered