district level cooling
 

how effective is it to consider a district level cooling system instead of having a cooling system housed within the data center?
it sounds like a cheaper option as far as initial investment is concerned. cooling can be treated as a utility and the data center can be charged only for the amount of cooling it requires. There won't be any need for maintenance, and additional space for cooling devices.

I think you have some very interesting ideas, bell. I don't understand the technicalities of this type of thing, but it sounds like something that would be both money-saving, and "green" at the same time.

District cooling is something of the future, not implemented successfully yet. Yes it would provide some major cost cutting options on the dc front. Such systems are designed to handle the cooling needs of apartments and business complexes, not the heat from Blade Servers! If district cooling is implemented for dcs it should be dedicated to service dcs alone. The demand is such.

kentucky, the cooing can always be directed once it is delivered to the data center if that is the only drawback. also, the advantage with district cooling is that it acts like a utility rather provides cooling as a service. so you will only be charged for what you consume (like electricity). motors can be turned on and off when the demand changes.

thank you spidertech, but like kentucky mentioned, it is relatively new and not a lot of information is available for access and we all know how industries react to change. i plan to do a thorough research over the weekend. lets hope i can come up with more details about DCS.

what is district level cooling? i haven't heard of this before

District level cooling is a concept which provides cooling as a service. The service agent used here is chilled water maintained at 4 deg celcius. Its passed through heat exchangers and coolers placed at other locations running upto even ~25Km. It can be implemented in data centers but I'm not sure if it has yet.

losses will be high in high environmental temperature areas..no point transmitting cool water over long distances to have its temperature increased on the way.