Greening the Data Center: A Pocket Guide

CHAPTER 7: FACILITIES – COOLING

Cooling is driven by power consumption and itself consumes power. Moreover, not only are some data centers constrained by power, but some are limited by their cooling capacity. The good news is that there are many ways to improve the use of existing services before building a new data center is required.

The Arrhenius equation and data center cooling

There is a very simple reason why data centers must be cooled. As the temperature rises, so too does the component failure rate. Svante Arrhenius was a Swedish chemist who noted that chemical reaction rates double for every additional 10°C.²⁷ We can apply this to IT equipment in the following way: for each 10°C rise in temperature, the component failure rate will ...