Energy saving work with Silicon Valley companies

Researchers from the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are working with Silicon Valley companies to demonstrate energy-efficient data centre technologies.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG), in partnership with the California Energy Commission, has encouraged SVLG member companies to demonstrate new or underused energy-efficiency strategies for data centres. Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Netapp, Oracle and many others have answered the call, demonstrating a variety of new technologies in the facilities of Silicon Valley companies.

The increased use of the world wide web, private corporate data networks and high performance computing has led to an extremely rapid growth in the energy use of data centres, at a time when the world is working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase energy efficiency.

“SVLG is trying out different technological approaches, determining which ones work and which don’t and publishing the results so that data centre managers can evaluate the case studies and decide what works for their facilities,” says William Tschudi, a project manager in Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division Applications Team.

Projects include: using sensors within IT equipment to control data centre room temperature; advanced control systems; and modular cooling systems.

The SVLG’s Data Center Energy Summit on 15 October in Sunnyvale, California, will discuss some of these projects.

More information on Berkeley Lab’s data centre research is availableat http://hightech.lbl.gov/datacenters.html.