Data Center Knowledge has an article about Google’s approach to chiller-less data centers. Google’s facility in Belgium has no chillers at all and banking on advanced weather forecasting to plan load levels from day to day. Immense energy savings are realized when they no longer have to run compressors for the refrigerant units used to cool the water that carries heat away. For a globally distributed company like Google that has a massive virtualized infrastructure, it becomes possible to leverage cloud concepts to not only deliver improved utilization and redundancy, but also seriously help in the goal of power savings.
Google’s team is already accustomed to routing loads away from a downed data center and is likely on the path to fully leverage their cloud’s ability to shift loads from region to region on demand. Using this feature they can operate applications during peak hours in data centers that have a lower external ambient temperature for power savings on a global level. This technique is coined “following the moon” where virtualized instances are shifted regionally as darkness falls upon other data centers peppered around the world.
With power becoming more constrained as technology and the world population increases in consumption it becomes imperative to leverage every efficiency we can muster. Google has once again shown that they are never complacent and delivering innovations that have real and lasting impacts.
Danny Kim
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