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By Mel Duvall

HP has opened what is being billed as the world’s first wind-cooled data center. The new facility, situated off England’s northeast coast near the town of Billingham, takes advantage of winds blowing in off the cold North Sea to cool servers running inside the facility.

The 360,000 square foot Wynyard Data Center was actually begun by EDS before HP took over the consulting giant in 2008, and will now serve as a facility for HP Enterprise Services.

In officially opening the facility, HP project director Maurice Julian said the data center is the most energy efficient the company has built to date. It incorporates eight, 2.2 meter (7.2 feet) diameter fans in each of four halls to bring cool air into the facility blowing in off the coast. Another eight fans are used to exhaust air. A mixing chamber in the facility recirculates air to maintain steady conditions in a pressurized plenum below the computer equipment.

The air is run through a bank of modular filters to remove dust and other contaminants. Air is forced up from the plenum through the floor and runs over the front of server racks before being exhausted. HP says the system keeps the server hall at a constant 24 degrees Celsius (75.2 F). When the temperature is colder outside, the facility uses heat generated from the servers to maintain a steady temperature.

HP demonstrates some of the Green features of the data center in a video that can be viewed here.

At an average of 9 pence per kilowatt hour (11.7 cents per kWH), the green design of the facility will save HP about $4 million in power annually. HP says that by 2011, the average data center in Britain is expected to spend around $15.5 million a year on cooling IT systems, equipment and plant rooms.

Running at full load, HP has calculated that the data center has a Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, of 1.2, meaning that for every 1.2 watts of electricity used to power servers, 1 watt is used for cooling and other facility needs. Until recently, most data centers had PUEs of 2.0 or higher, but companies have been making a number of advances in achieving energy efficiencies, and newer data centers are achieving PUEs of 1.5 or lower.

In addition to the natural air chilling method, the facility also harvests rainwater, which is used to maintain a proper humidity level.

Comments (2)

	1. 02-14-2010 04:22
	It is nice to see a large company set this type of precedent. Having this ratio for the PUE is a good sign of what is possible if just a little more thought was put into the design of these facilities. Too many are reworked older facilities which may save short term money but cost much more in the long run.    -sean    -sean Registered

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	2. 02-15-2010 10:05
	I agree with Sean, more thinking should go into the mix when constructing such Data Centers. The video does make it clear that this Data Center was, however, built from an existing warehouse structure. As the virtual tour suggests, there is no silver bullet for building this kind of solutions. They are using free air movement plenums as opposed to artificially air conditioning the flow of the air. Seems like a good solution to an ongoing problem. Registered

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