Green House Data: All-In With Free Cooling

Colocation and cloud hosting provider Green House Data this week unveiled design details for its new data center, which will use free cooling year-round. The 25,000 square foot facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming is set to open its doors in the first quarter of 2013.

The new facility will use a custom cooling system from Deerns America, which has been hired for its expertise in green data center design. Deerns America, a mechanical and electrical engineering firm, will implement its Green Cooling for Data Centers (GC-DC) technology. Green House Data says it expects this approach to outside air cooling, and with its efficient design, will allow the new facility to run at an annual average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.16 and a peak PUE of 1.22.

“This progressive step is an exciting advancement for our company adding additional data center space utilizing energy efficient 100% free cooling,” said Shawn Mills, President of Green House Data. “I see the increasing demand for low-energy cooling systems, green technologies and efficiencies as an avenue to reduce utility costs and offer these savings to our clients in this competitive industry.”

Separate Air Streams

In Deerns 'cooling system, outdoor air is drawn through a plate heat exchanger, where it absorbs heat from the IT room’s hot return air. It is then cooled and re-circulated through the data center. By separating the air streams, the outside air can be cooled evaporatively without influencing the humidity in the data hall and without risk of contamination from dust, smoke, pollen, and other particulates. If outdoor air temperatures rise, evaporative coolers will provide low-energy supplemental cooling without requiring refrigeration-based cooling systems.

The design employs a slab (hard floor) aisle containment. Additionally, the cooling system can seamlessly grow along with Green House Data’s modular data center building design as new units can be added as needed.

"With the cool, dry geographical location selection chosen by Green House Data, implementing our free cooling system will have a great impact on energy efficiency," said Gary Cudmore, Principal of Data Center Engineering for Deerns America. “Additionally, the GC-DC system we’ve developed for this project will provide a data center environment complying with ASRHAE TC 9.9 guidelines without the need for expensive, energy-intensive chillers.”

Deerns is a privately-owned firm with headquarters in the Netherlands and branches in the United States (Denver and Rockville, Md.), Germany, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Dubai. Deerns is focused on critical infrastructure including data centers, airports, hospitals, clean rooms, and biohazard labs. In the last five years Deerns has designed more than 2.3 million square feet of white space with almost 700 megawatts in IT power. The company's GC-DC cooling id described in a white paper on its web site.