[Beowulf] /. Swedish data center saves $1 million a year using seawater for cooling

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/051613-swedish-data-center-saves-1-269868.html

Swedish data center saves $1 million a year using seawater for cooling

Collocation provider Interxion uses water pumped from the Baltic Sea to cool
its data centers

By James Niccolai, IDG News Service 

May 16, 2013 04:26 PM ET

IDG News Service - A data center in Sweden has cut its energy bills by a
million dollars a year using seawater to cool its servers, though jellyfish
are an occasional hazard.

Interxion, a collocation company in the Netherlands that rents data center
space in 11 countries, uses water pumped from the Baltic Sea to cool the IT
equipment at its facilities in Stockholm.

[ IN PICTURES: 10 of the world's coolest data centers ]


Credit: James Niccolai, IDG News Service

Lex Coors of Interxion describes his company's salwater cooling system at the
Uptime Institute Symposium.  The energy used to cool IT equipment is one of
the costliest areas of running a data center. Companies have traditionally
used big, mechanical chillers, but some are turning to outside air and
evaporative techniques as lower-cost alternatives.

Seawater is another option, and apparently an effective one. Interxion
recouped its initial investment after about a year, with the "cost" of the
seawater equivalent to US$0.03 per kWh, said Lex Coors, Interxion's chief
engineering officer, at the Uptime Institute's data center conference in
Santa Clara, California, this week.

Interxion benefited greatly from the fact that there was already a network of
pipes around Stockholm that provides seawater for cooling. It worked with a
local partner to connect its data center to that network, at a cost of about
$1 million.

[SNIP]