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Data Center Essay

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Data Center is a complicated facility with extremely sophisticated and powerful I.T. equipment intricately paired with cooling systems inside a specifically designed building environment. This dynamic setting makes the objective of energy efficiency in such facilities more complicated. Another specification that makes the situation more convoluted is the operation time as well as operation conditions of such facilities. Data centers operate throughout the year non-stop at a very high functional capacity, which also raises a concern about the equipment maintenance during operation. Generally, data center operational energy consumption is broadly divided into two parts – 1. Energy required to operate the I.T. equipment 2. Energy required …show more content…

Not just electricity but other resources such as water are included in operational needs of many data centers. Taking into consideration the water used by the primary energy source that provides power to the data center [national average of 7.85 liters of water consumed for each kwh produced] along with the water used on site for data centers employing cooling towers based chillers, impact on environment is huge. A large data center (around 15 MW I.T. capacity) consumes between 80 – 130 million gallons of water annually during its operation. The same DOE report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory presents the past water consumption as well as forecasted prediction based on the current trends in energy efficiency standards of data centers in the following graph – NEED FOR A SEPARATE RATING SYSTEM FOR DATA CENTERS? There are several building rating systems actively assessing buildings across U.S. and rating them or certifying them based on the implementation of energy efficiency techniques. Building rating systems have become quite a trend in the modern era of efficiency marketing and professional recognition along with providing the energy savings and respective benefits. Now when it comes to Data centers there hasn’t been much talk about rating such facilities based on their operational efficiency. Yes, of course data centers use building materials and are similar to regular big commercial buildings from the outside but the equipment inside the building as

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