Google Data Center
Google data center are distributed across the entire world in order to handle the big data that Google accumulated through search queries and other pieces of information. The Google servers in their centers support many products concurrently like YouTube videos, search queries, Gmail, and are overall modeled to support cloud techniques. Google data center are part of the greenest data center infrastructures in the world. Efficiency is therefore a core term for Google in order to minimize the environmental impact of the Services running inside a data center. The aim is to utilize the servers around the the clock contributing to fewer servers and less energy. More details can be found on the official Google page here.
Five Design Best Practices
Google works over a decade on improving the energy Efficiency of their data centers that leads to numerous lessons learned. They share a couple of their best practices when running a small or large data center. These are often related to data center design choices to improve the efficiency of the facility, or to reduce its overall costs, or to reduce the center impact on the environment. Firstly, a the energy use of a data center needs to be accurately measured and tracked. This is often done with a ratio called Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) that measures the energy used for non-computing functions like cooling and power Distribution. This means the construction of the data center matters. Secondly, inside the data center needs to be a good air flow Management in order to be efficient.
The goal is to minimize hot and cold air mixing by understanding air flow within the data center. Thirdly, managers of the data center need to adjust the thermostat and should use an economizer so that equipment runs in cold aisles at 80°F or higher. This in turn enables elevated cold aisle temperatures that brings more days of ‘free cooling’ and energy savings.
Another best practice is to use free cooling whenever possible meaning the use of water and air-side economizers. The reason is that chillers use the most energy in a data center cooling infrastructure. The chiller refers to a machine that removes heat from a liquid using techniques such as vapor-compression or absorption refrigeration cycles. Hence using free cooling for the facility without using a chiller like with low temperate ambient air like for example in Iceland. Finally, Google recommends to optimize the power distribution with minimizing power distribution losses by eliminating as many power conversion steps as possible. This is achieved by using efficient equipment transformers and power distribution units (PDUs) as well as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). This is important since large losses in data center power distributions is from the UPS units. The last recommendation also includes to keep high voltages as close to the power supply as possible in order to reduce power line losses.
More about Google Data Center
We refer to the following interesting Video about this topic:
