Data centers run hot, and keeping the servers cool takes a lot of electricity. The right cooling settings keep shifting with the weather and with how hard the servers are working, which makes squeezing out waste a moving target. Every bit of electricity spent on cooling is power that does no computing.
The clever bit
At Telehouse's data center in Frankfurt, etalytics installed AI software that keeps tuning the cooling plant as conditions change. It adjusts the outlet temperature of the cooling towers and the flow of the recooling pumps, and it works with the equipment already in the building, with no new hardware. The point is to run the cooling plant only as hard as the moment requires, rather than at fixed settings chosen to cover the worst case.
The software ran in live operation from April 14 to August 5. Compared with past periods with similar temperatures and cooling demand, one of the site's five cooling units used 10.4% less electricity. The companies are now projecting savings for all five units.
Hooray
A double-digit cut on a cooling unit, from smarter settings on existing machines, is the kind of efficiency gain that can be repeated elsewhere without tearing anything out. Less power for cooling means less power overall for the same computing. It's also a reminder that some of the easiest energy wins in computing sit in the plumbing around the servers.
What comes next
The figures come from Telehouse and etalytics and haven't been independently audited. The 10.4% applies to one cooling unit, not the whole facility's electricity use, and the savings across all five units are projections, not results yet. Measuring savings against similar past periods is a reasonable method, but it isn't the same as a controlled test run side by side.