Maximize the Space

At Denver-based Cimarex Energy Co., data center project manager Rodney McPearson focused on improving his IT systems after the company decided to run a series of small, distributed data centers. Last year, Cimarex installed an American Power Conversion Corp. in-row cooler system that creates an enclosed area for servers. McPearson says it costs roughly $1,000 a month for the system to cool about 90 servers. In contrast, a conventional cooling system in another room chills a similar number of servers for $2,500 a month.

At Virgin America Inc., CIO Bill Maguire says he maximizes the use of space and saves money through a variety of means, including eliminating raised floors and using water-cooling systems from Liebert Corp. that cool from above instead of blowing air up from below. He says his choice of energy-efficient blade technology from Verari Systems Inc. was critical as well. This approach has cut his energy cost by about 27% total, Maguire says.

Make Use of Mother Nature

Microsoft Corp.'s new 500,000-square-foot data center in Chicago will use cooling systems that take advantage of the abundant natural sources of cooling in the Windy City. The technologies are called airside and waterside economizing systems, or "free cooling." Airside economizers use outside air to cool data centers. Waterside technology takes water from a natural source such as a stream, pond or river and brings it in contact with pipes carrying heated water out of the data center. The outside water cools the water in the pipes, which then recirculates back into the data center. Carl Cottuli, vice president at APC's data center science center in West Kingston, R.I., estimates that economizers can cut utility bills by as much as 30% on the days that they are used.

Technology can mitigate the need to find an ideal location. If you can pack computing power into denser systems that use less power and also find ways to tap alternative sources of energy, then taking a step such as, say, building a data center next to a hydroelectric dam might become less important. For instance, a developer that's building a data center in Fall River, Mass., intends to build two wind turbines that could supply 20% or more of the planned 120,000-square-foot facility's power.