Green technology for Google data center
"Google maintains its leadership position in building a green Internet" [1]. This predicate does not make the Internet giant any lower organization than Greenpeace. In this "green color", the cooling system is one of the latest data centers built by Google in Hamina, Finland. Wilo's high-performance pumps have been installed to cool the countless networked servers in the 9,000 m² complex to operating temperature. Not because they look green, but actually are - from energy efficiency to reliability to life.
In the construction of new data centers, for many well-known internet companies, only Greenpeace complains in which region the electricity is the cheapest. Google, on the other hand, is a different, an ecological path. According to the latest report, "Clicking Clean", in which Greenpeace has examined the life cycle assessment of 300 of the world's largest data centers, Google is also an industry leader in environmental protection. The Group has set the target to cover the electricity demand for its data centers only from renewable energies. At the same time, great efforts are being made to increase the energy efficiency in the centers themselves, in particular for the energy-intensive cooling of the servers.
One example of this is the location selection of the latest Google data center for Europe in Hamina, Finland. Not the price of electricity was the decisive factor, but the low average temperature of 2 ° C and the direct proximity to the Finnish sea. This is because server cooling is ensured with the help of cold seawater. The Wilo pumps "CronoLine-IL" make a decisive contribution to the ecology and economy of a main node of the global data highway.
Plenty of water, little electricity
The power requirement for data centers in 2011 amounted to 684 billion kWh. By comparison, all of Germany consumed "only" about 607 billion kWh in the same year. Forecasts assume that the energy starter, driven by cloud computing, will increase by 63 percent by 2020. As of today, 22 percent of the energy consumption in data centers is attributable to cooling. As a result, water cooling by natural resources, such as in Hamina, is a decisive concept for increasing efficiency. But also the pumps, which are used to promote the cooling water in the data center, are subject to high efficiency criteria, as shown by the Wilo pumps "CronoLine-IL" used here.
In order to be able to provide the necessary cooling water quantities, the dry rotor pumps are installed horizontally in the pipeline sections as inliners. The pipe dimensions of the cooling circuits range from DN 150 to DN 200. The impellers of the pumps are designed for this purpose: the nominal diameter is 320 or 270 mm. The specific impeller geometry and a flow optimized coating contribute to a high overall efficiency. The hydraulic efficiency of the "Wilo-CronoLine-IL" with connection nominal size DN 150 is over 80 percent, with DN 200 connection a good 70 percent. Engine efficiency is 94 percent. Thus, an engine torque of between 30 and 37 kW is enough to promote the required volume to cover the cooling loads. Additional energy savings are achieved by the speed control of the pumps by means of frequency converters.
Reliable and economical
The Internet never sleeps. The number of search queries that Google answers per second alone shows the high demands that the Group must make on the availability of its data centers. In addition, key cloud services are available to companies with global locations that provide data around the clock. In addition to computer technology as such, cooling is also a decisive factor for operational safety. Modern server systems are now approved for working temperatures of up to 35 ° C. But without cooling this limit would be exceeded in a very short time and everything would be paralyzed.
To ensure that the pumps provide reliable cooling water for a constant temperature retention, Wilo manufactures pump housings and individual components made of highly resilient materials. The housing and impeller of the pump series "CronoLine-IL" in the Google data center consists, for example, of wear-resistant cast iron with lamellar and / or spherical shape. In order to further reduce the life cycle costs of the pumps, the pump lantern consists of a patented design. It ensures the targeted removal of the relatively large amounts of condensate which are deposited on the pump housing when cold media are conveyed at a high ambient temperature. This protects the pumps against the typical corrosion damage. In addition, highly resilient mechanical seals made of carbon fiber, silicon carbide, EPDM and stainless steel ensure long service intervals.
Conclusion
"Digitalization in companies is progressing rapidly. The same applies to the private environment - as the keyword 'Smarthome' proves. At the same time, energy resources are becoming scarcer. "Green IT" is gaining more and more weight, "Sven Prochowski (Senior Vice President, Group Information Management) also knows the developments in data center cooling from the user perspective.
This is also the case for the IT company Cisco, which predicts a huge increase in Internet use by 2020: In 2015, "only" 40 percent of the world's population had access to the web, it is probably 52 percent in 2020. At the same time, the technological progress allows to transport ever larger amounts of data. If the users generated a data transfer of 9.9 GB per head and month in 2015, the 25 GB is expected to be exceeded in 2020 - an increase of 150 percent! [2] "The technological advances in computer technology are enormous and in everyday life quite obvious to most people. Behind the scenes, however, a supposedly conventional technology such as pump technology plays a very important role in bringing energy efficiency and global networking together. Wilo contributes with its research and development performance ", confirms Dr.-Ing. Markus Beukenberg, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of WILO SE.
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