Computer Centre has achieved an unprecedented energy reduction in cooling its data centre by four times using a new hybrid cooling design.

The 10,000-square-feet (930-square-metre) facility, which houses 1,035 servers, is also NUS Computer Centre’s first data centre to deploy low, medium and high density zones in the same IT environment.

The data centre, the first hybrid facility of this scale in Singapore’s educational sector, uses a modular rack containment system that is designed to contain clusters of medium and high-density equipment and eliminate the mixing of hot and cold air streams to ensure that cooling is kept constant and achieves a high level of energy efficiency.

With the modular system, the data centre is able to carry out quick deployment of high density clusters to address changing needs and future expansion to meet the NUS community’s computing demands.

The increased storage capacity of the data centre enables NUS Computer Centre to provide an extensive range of teaching, learning and administrative services and facilitate faster computing and more data intensive research functionalities.

It now supports high performance computing more effectively, particularly for Big Data research, and achieves accelerated research stimulations.

“As one of the world’s leading universities, it is imperative for NUS to provide a conducive environment for the delivery of high quality education and world-class research,” said Tommy Hor (pictured), Senior Director, NUS Computer Centre.

“As we leverage on information technology and Internet more intensively for education, research and services, the deployment of medium and high density servers ensures that our data centre can meet the growing demand for a wider spectrum of online services, richer online content and faster computing power.”

NUS Computer Centre’s data centre has the capability to provide adequate cooling for its medium and high density zones. The cooling solution not only prevents downtime due to the creation of hot spots in these zones, it also improves energy efficiency and reduces the University’s carbon footprint.

The new cooling solution implemented in the data centre envelopes the medium and high density equipment to prevent hot server exhaust air from escaping into the room and mixing with chilled air. Cooling is targeted at the heat source so that less energy is needed for heat removal, resulting in a 30 per cent increase in efficiency over traditional cooling architectures.

By keeping cooling targeted and close to the heat sources, NUS Computer Centre avoids lowering the temperature of the entire IT environment unnecessarily. This allows the data centre to maintain its ambient temperature at 25 degrees Celsius and effectively reduce energy consumption.

“We are confident that the data centre, with its virtualisation technology and smaller energy footprints for servers and storage, is able to adequately support the University’s growing IT demands over the next few years without incurring extraneous energy expenditure and compromising availability of IT services,” said Hor.