Impact of variation of the cooling system operating strategy on energy efficiency and waste heat quality: a preliminary investigation on a hybrid-cooled data centre

Abstract The growing demand for digital services is leading to a rapid increase of the number of data centres worldwide. Because of the large amount of energy required to power these facilities and the consequent challenges for the energy system and the environment, efforts are made to discover new solutions that allow a more prudent use of energy without compromising the quality of the service provided. One of these potentially viable solutions is a less conservative configuration of the operating strategy of the cooling system, which can request up to 30% of the total power absorbed by a data centre. This paper is a first estimation of the benefits in terms of power savings and waste heat quality that would follow the implementation of this solution on the Green DC, a data centre based in Dublin, Ireland. The Green DC is installed within a university and provides a variety of services, like HPC and online lecture streaming.