GLUMAC - Engineers for a sustainable future

Aryn Bergman, LEED^® AP, San Francisco Mechanical Designer

The data center industry is on the rise again, but with a different focus. In the 90's, it was construction speed; this time around it is operating efficiency. Data center owners have had to learn the hard way that operating costs can quickly outweigh construction costs. Glumac has developed an exciting new data center design process with the efficiency issue at its core. This translates into huge savings for our clients.

Our involvement in data center design starts in the beginning with site selection. Location is by far the number one factor in the operating cost of a data center. "Site selection can mean the difference between a data center costing $3 million or $11 million a year in utility costs," says Chien Si Harriman, one of our Energy Modeling experts. We are currently developing a catalog of areas across the globe, flagging the safest and most economical site locations for data centers.

Glumac has performed a complete overhaul in our HVAC design strategies to meet today's new data center challenges. The power consumption of today's server racks can range from 4 kW per rack to well beyond 20 kW per rack. Traditional data center designs utilizing CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioning) simply can't meet the higher levels of cooling associated with denser server racks. We use a typical chilled water system with isolated hot and cold aisles in the majority of our designs. For our more extreme scenarios, we use a proven liquid CO₂ cooling design to meet the cooling demands of our most dense data centers. Both systems are safe, flexible, and economical in addition to being highly efficient. They can be up to 40% more efficient than a traditional CRAC unit design.

Our electrical engineers have also made some slight modifications to our electrical layout that have a huge impact upon the electrical consumption of our data center designs. First, they have built in the flexibility to switch the power delivery system from AC to DC. Once DC powered servers become more available, this will allow our clients to increase the data center's overall efficiency by 25%. The second major change in our new electrical design is the built in capability to easily connect to alternative energy sources such as co-gen, wind turbines, and/or fuel cells to our data centers.

Glumac is committed to helping curb our global energy consumption by significantly increasing the efficiency of the one of the world's largest energy sinks: data centers. A large data center can consume as much power as 8,200 homes. Increasing its efficiency by 30% is equivalent to taking 4,700 cars off of the road.