Quiet Cabinets Save Energy, Says Kell
Instead of keeping noisy machines in a server room, why not make them quiet enough to share the office air-con?
While most technology companies focus on finding new ways to cool down servers in data centres, one company has taken an opposite approach – finding a way to get servers into the air-conditioned comfort of the carpeted office.
Creating a cabinet does away with the need for a server room and allows servers to run alongside humans in an office, is a greener approach to providing data processing, Kell Systems said at Green IT Expo last week, showing off a sound-proofed cabinet for servers.
Shhh! Servers at work
Big data centres are inspiring a mass of effort around energy efficient cooling, but the air temperature required by servers is roughly the same as that humans need to work in, the people at Kell argue. So why not simply put the servers in the office?
The answer to that is that servers do need clean air, and they also make a lot of noise. Kell’s solution is to put the servers inside a standard rack, that is mounted in an office-friendly cabinet.
This has wood veneer on the outside, casters on the bottom, and – far more importantly – sound proofing and efficient acoustic baffles on the air intakes.
In typical usage, Kell server cabinets reduce perceived server noise by approximately 83 percent and CO2 emissions by 96.5 percent, compared with putting the servers in a data centre with purpose built cooling, according to Mark Richards, business development director at Kell.
“When compared to a server room, they reduce floor space by 90 percent, operating costs by 98 percent, and capital costs by up to 80 percent,” he said.
Despite the size of these claims, Kell is a comparative late-comer to Green IT events. Its cabinets were originally proposed simply to make servers run more quietly. The company noticed the green spin-offs later, as energy costs increased, and companies became more carbon-conscious, said Richards.
