Chilled Out HP Cuts CO2 Emissions With Fresh Air Cooling In Its New Wynyard Data Centre

HP Wynyard Highlights

• It is one of a number of Next Generation Data Centers being set up by HP
• It has redundancy and resilience designed in every aspect of its operation
• The first systems being installed belong to a large Enterprise Services customer
• Located close to HP’s Doxford data centre, offering site fail-over potential
• Is the first HP data centre to use fresh air cooling
• The cooling method requires a tall building and a country with a moderate ambient temperature
• Fresh air cooling will cut the use of traditional chillers to 20 hours per year
• The new approach is also testament to HP’s CSR strategy, representing something close to a ‘unique practice’

I had the great fortune to visit HP’s brand new data centre in Wynyard, UK and meeting with Maurice Julian (Facilities Project Director, UK) Lucio Furlani (Vice President, Enterprise Business Marketing, EMEA), Chris Coggrave (Data Centre & Cloud Computing Managing Principal, EMEA) and Engelina Jaspers (VP of HP Environmental Sustainability, Worldwide) among other HP executives.
Opened just last weekend, Wynyard’s first customer is in the process of installing its servers and storage systems in one of the four up-and-running data halls. The facility is housed in what was designed to be a massive supermarket distribution warehouse. In total it covers some 300,000ft². It has office space of 20,000ft² and has room for expansion – both with a matching half to the opened halls and with a potential specialist data room, which might be used for High Performance Computing. This is not designed as an internal HP Cloud Computing facility; rather it will house its customers’ systems, such as those of its Enterprise Services (mostly ex-EDS). HP is happy to host multi-vendor equipment, as I can testify having seen a number of other vendors’ gear in my tour of the plant.

Wynyard is a few miles south of HP’s pre-existing data centre in Doxford, near Sunderland and the two sites are linked by 2 ‘dark fibre’ links allowing full site fail-over capabilities. It joins a number of what HP describes as ‘Next Generation Data Centers’ (NGDC, but not to be confused with the company NGD).

HP currently has 11 twin data centres (for a total of 22) in operation or planned, with four in the US and others in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France and Singapore/Malaysia. Unfortunately for the area this is not going to create a lot of employment – the current site is staffed with only 19 staff, which will in fact drop to 12 when the data centre is up and running. There will of course be some ancillary employment as a result of HP’s new facility in distribution and installation of new equipment in future.

It’s designed to be a ‘lights out’ data centre. The lighting turns on automatically when someone enters an area of the plant. HP’s environmental consciousness even extends to painting its racks grey instead of the traditional black. Grey paint requires less lighting, which in turns leads to less electricity usage.

Fresh Air Cooling Will massively Reduce Chiller Costs

What is special about HP’s new facility is its use of Fresh air Cooling. While it produces massive cost savings verses the use of traditional Chilling machines, HP is also keen that this type of technology will help it meet its internal CSR target of a 20% reduction in emissions by 2013 from 2005 levels. I wasn’t surprised to see that HP has designed ‘redundancy’ into every aspect of its new facility. It has two electrical feeds, its own power plant, diesel generators, an ‘n+2’ approach to UPS and chillers on an adjoining roof. So it still had to stand the capital cost, even if the chillers are only designed to run for 20 hours a year.

Fresh air cooling is new to HP, although not entirely to the IT industry. BT’s Steve O’Donnell has been pioneering about the concept for some time. The principals of operation are shown in Figure 3. Air is sucked in large volumes (but slow speed) from the bottom left, through the air handling chamber, which has cloth filters to extract pollen and dust. We witnessed the air being humidified with water spray before entering the plenum (a large area under the data centre floor). In fact the volume of air required means that this method of cooling can only be deployed in facilities with very high ceilings. I was surprised that there was a large burst of air when entering the plenum, which was then unnoticeable once the door was closed. The cold side of the facility is designed to be at 24^oC, while the hot side is 34^oC

At the end of the plenum and on the same floor level is the UPS room in which HP has deployed many fully redundant machines. The air heated by cooling this room is vented into a void area above and then into the Data Halls.

The cold air from the plenum also rises through vents into the cold aisles of the data centre. HP has designed alternate cold and hot aisles in rows in each of the four data halls it has currently opened. The hot air is drawn by smaller fans to be expelled from the building above the air intakes. HP has installed an auxiliary plant allowing the air to be cooled by chillers and circulated back down to the lower floor if necessary. Fire or chemical pollution from a nearby industrial accident would be conditions in which HP would need to close the intakes. Similarly extremely hot weather (somewhat of a rarity in Britain) would also necessitate the use of traditional chillers to cool the air.

Some Conclusions – Fresh Air Cooling Saves Costs, But IS In CSR?

Having tested the fresh air cooling HP claims it will save 25,000 Megawatt hours per year – enough to power 2,240 homes with electricity. This has a clear financial benefit for the company. However it is also part of HP’s Corporate And Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy. I’ve always argued that companies should promote ‘unique practices’ (rather than ‘best’ ones) and HP is one of the first to use this technique. It is thinking of alternatives to traditional electricity usage and will use a different system in its new German NGDC. So I’ll list this as CSR.

Wynyard is also symptomatic of a shift in computer usage to very large dedicated facilities. I believe that we’re seeing a continued centralisation, with fewer people looking after more of the assets over time. To an extent this is due to the rarely found expertise in setting such large operations up (perhaps one reason why the majority of such plants have been set up in English-speaking countries first); in part it is also due to specialisation, scale economies and governance. Data centres such as Wynyard deliver massively better resilience and security than most organisations’ own sites. For once this is not a story about Cloud Computing – the style of application delivered from this plant is largely irrelevant.

Do you have examples of data centre savings on energy through innovative means? Would you call these Green or part of CSR? As always let me know by commenting on this post.