Data Centers Are Power Hogs, So Cooling System Efficiency Is Key


Data center efficiency is more than a luxury.

The lack of power and space is nixing the expansion of existing centers and slowing the construction of new centers at a time when demand for the facilities is outpacing supply. IT managers face few inviting options.

Because data centers don’t require a lot of manual labor, adding staff doesn’t solve the problem.

Instead, the biggest source of operational efficiency comes from power use. Already centers in the U.S. use in excess of 61.4 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year, or more than the automobile industry.

By 2011, this should double, making data centers the nation’s top commercial consumer of power, ahead of metals production.

Between 40 percent and 60 percent of the power use goes toward cooling,. That makes Core4 Systems’ introduction Monday of a more efficient liquid-cooled air conditioning offering all the more interesting.

The Napa company claims its system is significantly more efficient than those in the market and saved its first customer, Sonic.net, 72 percent of its cooling costs.

Core4 is talking to additional potential customers, including Apple and IBM, and claims a system for a small corporate data center costs between $5 million and $7 million.

For reasons stated above, the company could find itself in the right place at the right time. A green-tech contribution to energy efficient, it could play a role in the fight against global warming.