SOMO Zero Carbon Data Center Utilizing Opengate Technology
November 10th, 2009
A depiction of the server room design for the Sonoma Mountain Data Center in California, including projections on the amount of free cooling enabled by the design.
The “cash for clunkers” program has allowed thousands of Americans to help the environment by driving energy efficient cars. Now some old clunkers can help make a data center more efficient.
The Sonoma Mountain Data Center will use metal from recycled automobiles in a sophisticated new cooling system for its server rooms, according to Tod Stebbins, the project manager for the new facility, which is part of the Sonoma Mountain Village sustainable community in Rohnert Park, Calif., about 40 miles north of San Francisco.
“The Opengate system is so tight with the way it controls the air that you bring in only what the data center demands,” said Stebbins.
Recirculation Within Cabinets
Fan activity isn’t the only challenge presented by air flow issues within the cabinet. The ASHRAE Journal recently highlighted research by Syska Hennessy Group on the recirculation of hot air within cabinets, which found that pressure buildup behind servers can cause hot air to route around the outside or even the bottom of the cabinet, allowing it to mix with cool air at the server inlet. This problem becomes more acute as the power density of a cabinet increases.
Stebbins said Opengate’s pressure-centric approach can address this challenge, and be customized at the rack-top level, allowing cabinets with different power densities to be adjacent to one another, rather than zoning the data center by power density.
The lynchpin of the cooling design is the rack-top heat containment chimneys, which contain sophisticated pressure sensor systems from Opengate Data Systems that also monitor the IT load within each rack. The chimneys, which are made of the recycled metal, move air from the cabinet into a ceiling plenum, which then returns the waste air to the CRAH units.