Swedish data center saves $1 million year using seawater for cooling
Baku, May 20 (AZERTAC). A data center in Sweden has cut its energy bills by a million dollars a year using seawater to cool its servers, though jellyfish are an occasional hazard. Interxion, a collocation company in the Netherlands that rents data center space in 11 countries, uses water pumped from the Baltic Sea to cool the IT equipment at its facilities in Stockholm. The energy used to cool IT equipment is one of the costliest areas of running a data center. Companies have traditionally used big, mechanical chillers, but some are turning to outside air and evaporative techniques as lower-cost alternatives. Seawater is another option, and apparently an effective one. Interxion recouped its initial investment after about a year, with the “cost” of the seawater equivalent to $0.03 per kWh, said Lex Coors, Interxion`s chief engineering officer, at the Uptime Institute`s data center conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this week.
Interxion benefited greatly from the fact that there was already a network of pipes around Stockholm that provides seawater for cooling. It worked with a local partner to connect its data center to that network, at a cost of about $1 million. But other bodies of water might make sense for data centers where seawater isn`t an option.
Other news in this section
