5 Cost Effective Green Data Center Cooling Solutions

In our rapidly heating world, it is important to maintain green data center cooling practices using environmentally friendly data center cooling products and solutions. Investing in new products can sound expensive, but the great news is that the more environmentally friendly your data center solutions are, the more cost effective they can be. Best of all, you do not have to spend a lot of money to make a green impact with your data center.

For example, here are some great suggestions that can help you reduce your data center cooling costs. To help you prioritize, we’ve organized this list from most expensive to least expensive. Of course, as soon as you are ready for more personalized energy-saving advice, contact Donwil.

Hot and Cool Aisles

Especially if you have smaller, high density servers, setting up your server room with clearly delineated hot and cool aisles will help you save a lot of energy. The concept behind this method is that if you plan half of your aisles to handle hot air blowing out of your equipment, and the other half of the aisles to handle cold air that blows into your servers’ air intakes, you will only need to focus on cooling part of your data center. Cutting your cooling needs will cut your costs, and your energy usage too.

Portable Cooling Solutions

Using a single in-room cooling solution to cool your data center equipment inevitably creates imbalances in your temperatures, with some areas feeling freezing cold and others feeling balmy. If your IT staffers are wearing down jackets in some parts of your data center, those are clearly areas that you are overcooling – which is wasting your money and increasing your carbon emissions. Putting cooling solutions only in the areas where they are needed is a great green data center cooling tactic.

Sensors and Remote Monitoring Equipment

Installing sensors and remote monitoring equipment to identify fluctuations in temperature and humidity (as well as a host of other factors) can help you respond proactively to energy-hogging temperature loads. It can also help you deliver enhanced precision cooling solely to the areas that need it – precisely when they need it.

Having troubles visualizing this? Think of it like drip irrigation vs. a sprinkler system. If you had a sensor in the ground that would water the soil precisely around your tree roots only when they reached a certain threshold of dryness, that would save a lot more water than if you ran a sprinkler that hit the tree trunk every day all day. (Now that’s a green analogy!)

Insulation

Insulation is a great passive cooling solution that many companies overlook, but it can be highly effective as a green data center cooling solution. Ensuring that your data center’s walls are insulated against the summer heat, and that any piping or ductwork that delivers cooled air or water cooling is also insulated against cooling loss, will cut your carbon footprint with little effort and investment on your part.

Cable Management

This surprisingly effective method of cutting your energy usage is one that companies rarely think of, but cable management can have a big impact. The concept behind this idea is that servers, especially ones in high density systems, have very little airflow – and poorly organized cables cut that airflow even more. Implementing streamlined cable management tactics, such as bundling, cutting out extra length, and clearing unused cables out of the way of airflow can improve your cooling initiatives quite a bit.

Running cables parallel to airflow, as opposed to blocking airflow with perpendicular cables, is also highly effective for ensuring that you are maximizing your cold air distribution.

Get the Most from Your Green Data Center Cooling Initiatives

If you look online, you will run across a wide range of cutting-edge environmentally friendly data center cooling products (some of these are wild, like underwater data centers!), but these types of solutions are often best suited for large data centers planning full redesigns and overhauls.

The solutions in this article are here to help you cut costs quickly, achieve green data center cooling goals quickly, and ensure you meet your ROI quickly.

Looking for Quick Help? Contact Donwil.

Since 1965, Donwil has been the team to trust for sales backed by responsive and reliable service for enterprises that want to get the most from their critical business process power and cooling solutions. As the exclusive provider of Vertiv, Liebert, Starline, and Hitachi, Donwil delivers a range of critical services and solutions to keep organizations across Western Pennsylvania, Western Virginia, and Eastern Ohio always running.