Setting the air conditioning system (temperature, humidity) consumes an average 30% of the total consumption of the data center.

Today, the majority of Datacentres are operated at temperatures near 20 ° C (68 ° F and 70 ° F) [ASHRAE Class 1 – Precursor on this subject, the American Association of Professional air conditioning ( ASHRAE [a classroom environment that describes the appropriate environmental conditions within a data center (eg, temperature between 18 ° C and 27 ° C).

The Code of Conduct on the Datacentres requires its participants to purchase equipment and adjusting the air meeting the requirements of environmental class 1 ASHRAE.

ETSI EN 300 019-1-3 – The European Union, through the ETSI [Free Cooling for Datacentres equipped. The Code of Conduct on the Datacentres require compliance with this standard for new equipment and for setting the cooling system from 2012.

Some tips before you adjust the air conditioning

During installation, place the server room located in a room facing north.

Reduce heat release:

Turn off all unnecessary equipment 24/24 (monitors, peripherals, servers).

Virtualize to reduce the number of physical machines

Close openings to hunt thermal bridges, air leakage.

Concealing, see isolate any windows to prevent the warming due to solar radiation (greenhouse effect).

Beware of heating pipes which can cross the room, if necessary, to isolate them.

> Place the fresh air inlets in areas closer to cool.

Concept “hot aisles” / “cold aisle”

Implement the containment of the air hot and cold aisles (see diagram cons).

Enjoying the cool night and the winter set up the Free Cooling. View the feedback of the project EcoClim.

In the case of a large data center, it is advisable to distribute the equipment in the data center based on their environmental specifications.

If the data center has facilities for distribution of cold (CARC [ETSI EN 300 019

Microsoft and Google already operate the system Datacentres without refrigeration (which are therefore based on the Free Cooling) that operate at temperatures exceeding 35 ° C (upper limit of Class 3.1 the standard ETSI EN 300 019 is 40 ° C)

An optimal setting for each data center

A rise in temperature (but still within the standard) allows:

Fewer seek the active cooling system (Cooling Unit).

To extend the periods during which it is possible to make the Free Cooling (if the data center has the facilities required for the FreeCooling).

Conversely, if the temperature rise is high (30 ° C and above), the power consumption of IT equipment can increase significantly (see the paper “The effect of the temperature of the fuel efficiency of a data center)

There is no optimal setting temperature applicable to all Datacentres.

There exists for each data center, according to its infrastructure (eg, whether or not equipped to perform the Free Cooling) and according to IT equipment installed, the optimum temperature which is within the temperature range recommended by existing standards.

While the current temperature of Datacentres is around 20 ° C, according to several experts, today, the optimum temperature lies somewhere around 27 ° C.

Unfortunately, the best way to determine specifically the temperature is still conducting tests to monitor the trend of global consumption of data center as a function of temperature.

Additional Resources

» Projet Ecoclim au LPSC Grenoble (FreeCooling)
» Nos ressources documentaires sur les Datacentres
» Onze conseils de Gartner pour optimiser l’efficacité énergétique des datacenters (source Le Monde Informatique – 19/11/2008 )
» source GreenerComputing
» source Datacenterknowledge
» American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers – Ashrae.org
» European Telecommunications Standards Institute pour Institut européen des normes de télécommunication –article Wikipédia sur l’ETSI
» Computer Room Air Conditionner : Power distribution of cold server room