cooling
The Dutch glass house agriculture industry is
uniting to investigate the feasibility of putting
excess data centre heat to good use.
VEGE-MIGHT!
Will flowers and vegetables lead the way towards data centre heat reuse?
Sander Elvik of ICTroom takes a detailed look at the future of data centre
cooling and its environmental impact, as well as opportunities.
W
ith energy costs
rising and with
environmental
legislation
becoming ever
more stringent and sustainability
becoming a goal in its own right,
more and more data centre operators
are gearing themselves up towards
the next step in data centre cooling
efficiency: heat reuse.
The cooling infrastructure is a
vital element in any data centre,
providing essential support to the
business applications running in
them. These applications in turn
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are becoming even more critical
to the society as a whole, be it for
financial and/or economical services,
healthcare, science, communication
(social media) or entertainment.
Essentially, our society depends
on the services provided by data
centres, and as such the cooling
infrastructure works indirectly in
support of society.
The cost of cooling
But this support comes at a cost.
With cooling being the major part of
it, the PUE of data centres in the past
used to be at an average of 1.8 or
higher. In other words, for every Watt
of energy that was consumed by