Sun and Belgacom engineers collaborated on a proof-of-concept environment to show how to effectively and efficiently cool carrier-grade servers, namely Sun Netra servers, using only ambient air. Erik Vanden Meersch and Ravi Sanjeev with Sun, along with Johan Vanderhaegen of Belgacom, reveal their discoveries in a Sun BluePrints Online article "Conserving Energy and Increasing ROI with Sun Netra Servers and Full Free Air Cooling."

The technique termed "full free air cooling" or FFAC eliminates mechanical cooling systems, which in turn lowers energy use and operational costs, the paper contends. The proof-of-concept effort covered in this 20-page PDF is focused on how to achieve considerable energy savings at the facilities infrastructure level.

Topics covered:

• "Sun Netra servers and NEBS/ETSI compliance" describes the Sun Netra servers and their environmental characteristics.

• "Green trends in datacenter design" explores the topic of decreasing energy use in datacenters, highlighting successful strategies and environmental "optimizers" that are helping to reduce datacenter energy consumption.

• "What is 'full free air cooling'?" compares and contrasts traditional datacenter cooling techniques with the FFAC approach.

• "The FFAC datacenter prototype" describes how to build a test environment using FFAC. This section also introduces the concept of Power Use Efficiency (PUE) in measuring a datacenter's efficiency with respect to energy use.

Based on this particular prototype and testing efforts, a decrease of up to 40 percent of the total datacenter energy consumption is quite realistic, write the engineers, who summarize, "The FFAC approach is one of the most effective measures of reducing datacenter energy consumption that can be achieved with existing technology today.

"The technology exists today for almost all widely accepted datacenter components," they write, "which means that it is likely that FFAC will increase in its rate of adoption."

More Information

Conserving Energy and Increasing ROI with Sun Netra Servers and FFAC - (login or registration required)

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) [...read more...]

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