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Internet Giant Rethinking the Data Center

April 1, 2010 By Diane Greer

There is an old engineering adage that says you can’t have faster, better and cheaper all at the same time. Yahoo is out to prove this adage wrong with its new data center under construction in upstate New York.

The facility, located 30 miles northeast of Buffalo in Lockport, N.Y., is being billed by the company as one of the greenest and most energy efficient building of its kind in the country. Powered by renewable energy from Niagara Falls, the data center’s design takes advantage of the region’s climate to cool the facility using 100 percent outside air.

 Photo courtesy of Structure Tone
Instead of precast concrete or steel and precast concrete, the Yahoo’s 115,000-sq-ft data center outside of Buffalo, N.Y. employs pre-engineered metal buildings.

“It is going to be, by far, Yahoo’s most efficient and arguably the most innovative data center, at least from a cooling perspective,” says Scott Noteboom, Yahoo’s director, data center engineering operations.

The Lockport facility, which broke ground in August 2009, is part of a Yahoo initiative to become a leader in the design and construction of environmentally sustainable data centers. The effort is integral to the company’s commitment to reduce its carbon intensity by 40 percent by 2014.

The 115,000-sq.-ft. complex is comprised of four structures; a 25,000-sq.-.ft administrative building and three, 30,000-sq.-ft. data center wings. Sufficient space is available on the 30-acre site for three additional wings. Completion is slated for June 2010.

Factors that made Lockport an appealing location for Yahoo include abundant clean electricity, fiber optic network capacity, available real estate, a ready work force, tax incentives and, perhaps most of all, the region’s mild climate.

“Traditionally it is not a humid climate and on average the temperature only exceeds 90 degrees Fahrenheit a small number of hours per year,” explains Terence Deneny, vice president at New York based-Structure Tone, the project’s general contractor.

“The attractive climate and the consistent winds off the Great Lakes have really enabled us to be more efficient in the design,” Noteboom says. Instead of using traditional cooling technologies, the design relies on outside air to cool the facility.

“To the best of my knowledge this is the first data center in the country using total outside air cooling,” Deneny says.

Data Center Design The design is the result of numerous studies conducted by Yahoo which determined that traditional raised floor data centers were poorly managed from an air flow perspective, Noteboom explains.

“When you take into consideration all the fans with the air handlers and all the consolidated fan horsepower of the servers, because of the poor management you end up with 300 percent more fan horsepower than required.”

Design of the new data center leverages the local climate and simply physics to turn the entire building into an air handler with the server fans providing the fan horsepower required to manage air flow in the facility.

By consolidating the fan horsepower of the servers and eliminating a large percentage of the traditional air handling solutions Noteboom expects to saves 0.35kW per ton of cooling.

The complex, dubbed the Yahoo Computing Coop since its design resembles that of a chicken coop, is oriented on the site to take advantage of the prevailing winds off the nearby Great Lakes. Data center wings, or pods, are

configured as long rectangles with side walls lined with controlled louvers. When the louvers are opened, natural ventilation and the server fans draw cool outside air into the building to a “cold aisle.”

 Inside view of the cupola structure running the length of the data center wing. Warm air exhausted by the IT equipment into the hot aisle rises and is vented through the louvers in the roof cupola. (Modeling and Coordination by CADFORCE Inc. Jonathan Scaggs, Project Manager)

Equipment racks housing servers run along the length of the building on both sides, parallel to and with server fronts facing the cold aisles. Fans on the servers draw cool air from the cold aisle across the servers and exhaust it out the back of the units to a “hot aisle” that runs down the center of the building and is open to the roof.

The high-pitched roof is designed with a cupola that extends the length of the pod. Side walls of the cupola are equipped with controlled louvers. Warm air exhausted into the hot aisle rises and is vented through the louvers in the roof cupola.

“We are taking advantage of the natural laws of thermodynamics with heat rising and evacuating out of the building in essence by a center chimney,” Noteboom says. “The cold aisle is tied into a plenum that draws in air from the outside.”

Auxiliary fans aid in the process as required, Deneny says. “But not anything close to what you would see in larger data centers.”

When Lockport gets hot, on average about 212 hour per year, the data center will run an evaporative cooling system. “We have innovated a more modern version of the swamp cooler,” Noteboom explains.

During periods of extreme cold the heat from the UPS (uninterrupted power supplies) systems, located in each pod, along with the heat generated by the computer equipment will warm the facility.

While the design is innovative for a data center, the design principles can be found in historic industrial facilities in the Buffalo area, Noteboom says. These historic structures were oriented to take advantage of the prevailing winds from the lakes and used outside air for cooling. “Back then refrigerant cooling did not existing.”

“We are applying lessons that were learned during the industrial revolution in Buffalo to a modern data center, which is a new industry in Buffalo,” he says. “I think that’s kind of cool.”

Noteboom estimates the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of the new center at 1.08. PUE is defined as the total power used by the data center divided by the power used by the IT equipment.

...watt of power used to run the computer equipment an additional watt of power was required to cool the facilities, distribute power and take care of other ancillary power requirements.

 Rendering showing the side view of a data center wing. Data center wings, or pods, are configured as long rectangles with side walls lined with controlled louvers. The high-pitched roof is designed with a cupola also equipped with controlled louvers. (Modeling and Coordination by CADFORCE Inc. Jonathan Scaggs, Project Manager)

Yahoo’s PUE of 1.08 implies that the average cost to cool the facility is less than one percent of the power required to run the servers and other IT equipment in the data center.

Beyond saving energy, eliminating traditional chiller based systems and cooling towers is saving enormous amounts of water. Noteboom estimates that during the summer the center will save 125,000 gallons of water a day. “We are also saving millions of gallons of sewer discharge.”

The design eliminates the need for raised floors. Instead the facility is built on a concrete slab. Electrical distribution is run overhead.

“A lot of Yahoo’s servers come pre-racked,” Deneny explains. “The data center is built in such a way that that whole server cabinets slide into place and then connect to an electrical bus that is overhead.”

Unlike traditional data centers constructed of precast concrete or steel and precast concrete, the Yahoo Computing Coop employs pre-engineered metal buildings. It is very economic from a cost perspective and pretty fast to construct on the site, Deneny says.

The design for the data center is part of the paradigm shift toward utility computing. “Everyone envisions that a data center has to be this mission critical machine that has to look a certain way,” Noteboom says.

“In essence the data center is going more utility,” he says. “It is going bigger scale, built more efficiently and at a lower cost. Instead of building a 5x9 datacenter and getting 5x9 performance [referring to standard service times] you build two 4x9 data centers in diverse areas. You end up with better up time. That speaks to the future of utility computing. I call it geographic replication functions.”

“They say you can’t get faster, cheaper and better at the same time,” Noteboom says. “In this particular phase of data center evolution you kind of can. And we are.”

Lockport beat out other locations for the new facility in part because of a deal negotiated with the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to supply 15 megawatts of low-cost hydroelectric power from NYPA’s Niagara Power Project. The town also offered a 20-year tax incentive that includes a 100 percent tax exemption for the 10 years.

In January the project won a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. The award was part of $47 million in grant money allocated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for the development of new technologies to improve the energy efficiency of the information technology sector.

The project is currently on track for completion in June. “Building in Buffalo during the winter is never an easy task,” Deneny says. “The subcontractors and vendors on the project are used to dealing with the weather and all aspects of the projects are coming together well.”