The project details have advanced
beyond this legacy page and all information regarding this project
can be found at
http://www.amilabs.com/tgs
Thermoelectric Green Device Research Project
Data centers today
face multiple energy and power consumption related issues due to the
growing power consumption demands of computing assets, the rising
cost of energy, increased need for disaster recovery/ UPS standby
long term emergency power, increasing HVAC needs for growing server
farms and surrounding environmental issues. Applied Methodologies,
Inc. Labs (AMILABS) is currently conducting research that holds
promise in helping the Information Technology (IT) industry and
environment mitigate these issues.
Three of the most
common issues that have increased over the last five years in
relation to data center power consumption are depicted below:
In today’s
Information Technology(IT) environment, IT now has to integrate
itself within the corporate business practices to further advance
the corporation’s competitive advantage and bottom line via
technology, yet no longer function solely as an expense based support
organization. IT is becoming an ever more critical component of a
corporate enterprise and not just an expense. However, as this
functional component increases in value to the enterprise so are its
costs to operate. One such major cost is that of the cost of energy
and the power consumed by IT components to drive an enterprise and
help it improve its bottom line.
Data centers around the globe are consuming more
power and requiring more energy at a faster rate than expected. The
same fact applies to just the sheer number of personal computers in
households around the world. The advent and ongoing evolution of the
internet, multimedia and broadband technologies will just continue to
contribute to this power consumption trend.
How much power will
be required to run data centers in the future and how much energy is available to support this
development
is a major question that should not be overlooked by CEOs, CIOs, IT
managers, consumers, environmentalists, and political representatives. Another source of
concern is how to retrofit existing data centers with
fixed footprints and power capacity constraints which are not easy
to remediate.
For the last year
many IT industry journals have consistently identified a common set
of issues, challenges and solutions regarding data center energy
usage.
Some of those common
issues and solutions consistently discussed are as follows:
 | Rising
data center energy costs |
| Cooling
challenges of the data center and individual devices |
| Rising power
requirement needs of faster chips/systems |
| Rising overall
power consumption of the data center |
| Multi Core
CPUs |
| Efficiency of
performance per watt and Thermal Design Points |
| Environmental
standards and regulation bodies’ adherence |
| Newer CPU and
general microchip technologies, smaller dies, lower voltage CPUs
and intelligent thermal monitor and control subsystems of a CPU
or other chips. |
| Virtualization
as a means to reduce required power consumption and carbon
footprint |
| DC based
systems – distribution and devices such as routers and servers |
| Next generation equipment requiring 208v power |
| All of the
relative challenges and approaches outlined above balanced to
assist in reducing a data center’s power related OPEX in an
efficient and satisfactory means. |
|
Green Grid identified issues and best practices |
Below is a link to some of
the articles discussing the above outlined issues over the past year
that depict the trends in the IT industry regarding energy costs and
power consumption.
Trends in IT Power Consumption Articles
While the IT
industry continues to focus on the issues at hand from the
standpoint of cooling, energy reduction and efficiency, plus make
significant strides in improving cooling and semiconductor power
consumption requirements, AMILABS has identified an area of science
and technology that the industry may have overlooked to help redress
some of the energy issues corporate data centers currently face.
What if it was
possible to reprocess the waste thermal energy generated from servers, routers, switches and other data center
computing devices and convert it into usable free energy? Plus, at
the same time not adversely affect the current cooling and thermal environment
of the device. An industry maxim states that in most data centers for each Kwh of energy consumed
by a server roughly another Kwh is used up to cool it. AMILABS has
successfully lab tested that it is possible to co-generate power at
the same time by reprocessing the wasted energy byproducts of various devices.
AMILABS has come up
with a novel idea, approach and prototypes to help in the effort to
reduce data center energy costs plus assist in the movement to make
data centers more environmentally friendly (green).
Introducing
the AMILABS ThermoGreen Server™
The
ThermoGreen Systems™
depicted above are non commercial pre-production
prototype models only.
