eBay Demonstrates Lower Datacenter Costs Through Cooling Innovations

In an effort to reduce costs, many businesses are turning to consolidation, where each new server is expected to take the place of multiple systems and be able handle all their workloads. Energy efficiency is a top priority, and many large enterprises are searching for cooling and power controls that are currently available to minimize cooling costs while running large data centers. The Green Grid (News - Alert), a non-profit consortium of tech companies that works to optimize data center design, has recently reported on eBay’s latest cooling efforts for its Phoenix data center where temperatures can range as high as 115 degrees.

The best case scenario for data center cooling measurements is a power unit effectiveness (PUE) of 1.26. PUE measures the efficiency of a data center, and the closer to 1, the better. The formula tallies the total amount of power used by a data center to the power delivered to computing equipment. A PUE of 1.35, the measurement for eBay’s (News - Alert) desert data center in Phoenix, is adequate but not great. At times, eBay is running at least part of its new Phoenix data center at temperatures as high as 115 degrees. The temperatures are so high, eBay can cool the facility with hot water.

This is significant because it shows the kinds of innovations companies are exploring in efforts to reduce their environmental impact. Nicknamed “Project Mercury,” eBay’s data center is part of a sweeping movement that includes other well-known companies, such as Google, Dell, Facebook, Microsoft (News - Alert) and HP. For example, Google has advocated the functionality of hotter data centers. They insist that servers run adequately at temperatures well above 80 degrees, and countless other operations have followed suit.

eBay didn’t locate its facility in the desert just to prove a point. It put the facility there because it needed a data center in the Phoenix area. Then it found a way to run it efficiently including data center “containers” on the roof of its Phoenix building. Pre-packed with servers and other gear, eBay uses the water in its outdoor tower tank that can reach 87 degrees on the hottest of summer day. The company finds this water is cool enough to operate the heat exchangers that keep the facility’s servers from reaching the extreme temperatures where they might malfunction.

According to Dean Nelson, eBay’s senior director of global foundational services, “If we can solve this in a desert, we can solve this almost anywhere. Wherever we have our data centers,” Nelson says, “we’re going to optimize our infrastructure.” As mentioned previously, a PUE of 1.35 is good. If you consider the eBay datacenter containers on their own, their PUE was a mere 1.018 when they were in operation this past January. And even when the outside temperature reached 115 Fahrenheit in the middle of August, the report says, the 20-rack rooftop containers still had a PUE of 1.046.

A cooling measurement of 1.018 appears to be unprecedented, according to the industry journal, Data Center Knowledge. As John Pflueger, the principle environmental strategist at Dell (News - Alert) puts it, “This resets the bar for what’s possible in the data center. The companies whose data centers are like factories are really the ones [incentivized] to squeeze efficiencies out of their data centers.” Members of the Green Grid consortium are hoping that these types of power management controls provide efficient and effective tools needed to increase the capacity of datacenters by reducing power and cooling requirements in amounts that accurately reflect the workload of your server.