Data center wind powered

CHEYENNE – When it opens at the beginning of next year, Wyoming’s first independent data center could become the first in the country with a zero-carbon footprint.

Green House Data’s enterprise-class, tier-3 data center, providing clients managed server hosting and data storage services, will rely on the state’s plentiful wind for its huge power needs and take advantage of the state’s chilly soil, using geothermal technology to cool the equipment.

The company says that, when fully operational, the 10,000-square-foot center will be one of the nation’s largest wind-powered public data centers, operating twice as efficiently as traditional facilities of comparable size. The cost savings from such energy efficiency will be passed on to clients.

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“The amount of electricity these things pull is just incredible,” Green House Data President Shawn Mills said. “It is a super-hot topic in the data center industry right now.”

Mills recently resigned as president and executive director of the Wyoming Technology Organization – the statewide technology trade association he founded two years ago – to pursue the business venture, along with partners Cortney Thompson and Thomas Burns.

“Recent studies have shown that companies will pay 5 to 10 percent more for a green data center,” Mills said. “We’re building it on the premise that green actually means lower costs, so we aren’t going to be charging a premium. We’re actually going to be offering our services at about 10 percent less than a traditional data center, in say, Denver, due to the fact that we’re able to save so much money on our energy efficiency investment. It helps our economics, and it helps the environment and is socially responsible.”

The firm began signing up clients Oct. 1 and anticipates pre-selling 10 percent to 15 percent of the center’s capacity. Three companies have already signed on.

Notorious power hogs

Mills says data centers are notorious for being power hogs and their energy consumption is increasing. A high-density rack of servers that not too long ago required just 3 kilowatts of power now requires 30 kilowatts.

“Computing power is increasing tenfold while efficiency is only increasing by about 10 percent,” he said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that in 2006 data centers consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity at a total cost of about $4.5 billion. That represents 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption –  more than the electricity consumed by all the nation’s color televisions. It is similar to the amount of electricity consumed by 5 percent of all homes in the country, or approximately 5.8 million average U.S. households.

In its report to Congress last August on server and data center energy efficiency, the EPA said 2006 consumption levels were more than twice the levels used in 2000, and under current efficiency trends, that could nearly double again by 2011 to more than 100 billion kWh, representing a $7.4 billion annual electricity cost.

And the need is growing. The agency said that if current trends continue, the increasing demand would require an additional 10 power plants to be built to keep pace with the needs.

Cheyenne location perfect

Mills said cooling normally represents 50 percent of the power requirement of a data center, meaning that the geothermal cooling Green House Data will employ will represent a huge energy savings.

“The beauty of our Cheyenne location is that we’re in a rural setting that allows us to take advantage of the space to utilize some of these technologies that in an urban setting you could not implement,” Mills said. “Hybrid geothermal cooling is going to become more and more prevalent among data centers over the next few years.”

Mills said Cheyenne was chosen as the company’s first location not just because of the plentiful wind that will power the facility and the open spaces that will cool it.

“The real  reason we’ve chosen Cheyenne is its proximity to the Colorado Front Range, as well as the fact that it sits on the western edge of several networks that drop down to Denver,” Mills said. “Our target is providing Wyoming companies with a solution for something they’ve never been able to stay in the state for, but also providing the secondary site and/or storage to companies down in Colorado’s Front Range.”

The company has aggressive expansion plans for its green data center concept, with a goal of opening similar centers in Ohio, Washington, Oregon and California over the next three years.

“This is a huge issue that the tech industry is trying to tackle,” Mills said. “This is a tremendous challenge that the industry is facing right now. We think that we will be one of the first centers to solve that challenge.”

For more information, go to www.greenhousedata.com.