With the increasing requirements of national policy on energy saving, energy saving is becoming the focus of the country and the whole society. China’s rapid development of information construction and huge demand of information has led to a lot of data center construction. The proportion of IT energy consumption in all the power consumption is rising. The data center has become a veritable “electric tiger” in wide range of industries. Energy saving and reducing consumption of data centers is extremely urgent. To develop the green data center become one of the primary tasks for the development of data center building.

Currently, the data center power consumption accounts for 1% of the global total consumption. In 2010, the power consumption of data centers in the United States reached 100 billion kilowatt, accounting for 2.5% of the total power consumption, and China has reached 2.4%. Resources and environmental problems have become the bottleneck in the development of the data center.

EYP Mission Critical Facilities Consumption Analysis to Room of Data Center

The energy consumption of data center is mainly composed of the following components:

First, IT Equipment System. The power consumed by the server, storage and network communications devices accounts for about 50% of the total power required by the data center room. The servers share about 40% of total power consumption and the other 10% of the power is shared equally by the storage devices and network communications equipment.

Second, Air Conditioning System. The power consumed by the air conditioning system accounts for about 37% of the total power required by the data center room. The air conditioning refrigeration system accounts for about 25% and about 12% of the power consumption is used for power consumption of the air conditioning supply and return air system.

Third, UPS Power Supply System. Their power consumption is about 10% of the total power consumption in the room. About 7% is from the UPS system power consumption and about 3% is from the UPS input power supply system.

Fourth, Lighting System. It accounts for about 3% of the power required by the data center computer room.

According to the analysis of energy consumption, data center energy-saving scheme consists of three levels: First, starting from the critical power and refrigeration, design and implement the scheme on energy saving on the basis of room infrastructure; Second, starting from hardware devices, carry out the energy conservation and reduce IT the energy consumption; Third, starting from chips to conduct energy saving. At present, the energy saving on hardware level and chip level has been recognized by the growing number of users. However, the energy conservation in critical power and refrigeration of infrastructure facilities has not attracted enough attention. In fact, the energy saving of infrastructure is the most important energy-saving way, so that you can solve the energy problem from its source and thus achieve a profound effect in energy saving.

First, increase the energy efficiency of IT equipment and broaden the permissible range of operating temperature and humidity.

If the user selects the IT equipment which are sensitive in working temperature and humidity, it is bound to let them spend a lot of manpower and material resources to establish and maintain energy-consuming air conditioning security system. Therefore, you should try to use the IT equipment with a wide range of operating temperature and humidity. In addition, the relevant operating experience indicates that for the air conditioning system, under the conditions of the other operating conditions unchanged, if the operation temperature of air conditioning is increased by 1℃, it will raise its operation efficiency about 3%.

Second, introduce the technology of natural cooling and airflow organizations.

Due to the cold air from the traditional room air conditioning cannot be 100% sent to the server-side, the efficiency of the most room air conditioning is only about 60%. In order to achieve the energy-saving of air conditioning, on the one hand, working to improve the airflow organizations, designing hot/cold aisle to distribute the equipment in data center, so that the cold air can pass directly to the access in front of server through the vents, and enables the hot air from the back of the server can be directly exhausted without coming across the cold air, so that it saves the energy consumption of cooling. On the other hand, choose a new air conditioning, for example, interline refrigeration air conditioning, which can be placed on both sides of the server cabinet, so that the hot and cold air can directly exchange between the cabinet and the air conditioning refrigeration in shortest cycle path to reach the cabinet (row) level refrigeration. Compared to room-level cooling, the cabinet-level refrigeration is capable of handling higher heat load density, the refrigeration capacity can vary with changes in IT load by modular products, and fan power consumption can be reduced by 50%. In addition, considering the colder climate, large wind, and close to the water, you should select insulation material for the building envelope, and make full use of the natural cold source in the design of the air-conditioning system, which is the key to the energy saving of room air conditioning.

Third, choose efficient UPS, introduce high-voltage DC power supply technology.

The UPS operation load ratio of many data centers is generally about 30%, and the UPS power supply efficiency is 50% to 60%. In response to this situation, the vendors compete in research and development of new technologies to make UPS have a high efficiency even at low load rate. In addition, the high-voltage DC UPS power supply technology in recent years has been gradually spreading, the high voltage DC UPS decreases two AC-DC conversion in the internal structure, energy saving is up to 10% to 20%.

Fourth, adopt green energy-saving LED light source, replace or partially replace the traditional light source.

Fifth, rational planning, conduct development of modular expansion.

In fact, over-planning is also one of the reasons resulting in high energy consumption and low efficiency of data center. Traditional data centers generally adopt one-time design, which not only led to high cost of initial purchase of the UPS and air conditioning equipment, but also increased the cost of energy consumption and services in later period. Users of the data center should take into account the need for future expansion, in accordance with the idea of growth while investment, procurement of the necessary equipment room facilities in section, realizing modular expansion, which will greatly reduce data center room power and cooling loss.

Sixth, intelligent centralized monitoring and management.

Room management of the data center is developing toward the precise direction to conduct real-time detection of cabinet microenvironment and to avoid generating unnecessary power and cooling capacity. Users can understand the real-time changes of current by this software and adjust the size of the outlet in order to achieve the energy saving effect. Users can also conduct real-time monitoring of room facilities, get precise knowledge of the room current, temperature, humidity, control the operation of equipment such as air conditioning and UPS to achieve the target of improving efficiency and saving energy.