Cyxtera Data Center: Energy-Efficient Cooling and Cost Savings

Challenge

Cyxtera Communications leased the Weehawken, New Jersey, data center site (NJ2) in 2001 in part due to its proximity to Wall Street and the New York-New Jersey financial markets. The close location meant Cyxtera could take advantage of near-zero lag time in providing its proximity hosting solution to its customers. The NJ2 facility is a split tower with ten, 300-ton Trane Model RTAA air-cooled chillers—five chillers on each tower, each with a Systecon Inc. pumping system and control panel. However, the original control system did not allow for the kind of comprehensive monitoring and control that a mission-critical data center facility requires.

Jason Garbus, Cyxtera Project Engineer, said, “It’s a critical application and these servers are tied in directly with Wall Street. Ninety percent of the work being handled in this data center is banking. If we lost data center precision cooling for only three to five minutes, temperatures could very quickly go from 70 to 95 degrees, and it would take at least a couple of hours to recover. That could cause all kinds of problems for our clients and their customers. Loss of control and cooling simply cannot be tolerated.”

Solution

Systecon Inc. and Trane commercial systems teamed up to install new Systecon VariPrim™ control panels along with Tracer Summit™ building control units (BCU) to communicate with the facility’s overall Automated Logic building automation system.

Scott Corbin of Systecon said, “The new panels include Allen Bradley SLC-5/5 processors and CTC Parker touch screen interfaces. This new control platform provides much better control—the touch screen is much more user friendly and includes extensive graphics so that operators can easily see system operating conditions. The VariPrime system is also consistent with other Cyxtera facilities. We also installed kW meters on the pumps and data center chillers so that operators can instantly see energy consumption.”

Results

The work began in early March 2009, with a kickoff meeting for everyone involved in the project. A June 15 deadline was set but the job was completed three days early. Garbus remarked, “We had absolutely zero impact on our customers’ transactions and the operation of the data center. We never lost chilled water flow or temperature control, and we completed all of this during normal work hours.

Thanks to the Systecon VariPrime and Tracer Summit BCU upgrades, Cyxtera has better, more precise control of the data center chiller system and is reaping huge energy savings. For example, instead of running all 10 data center chillers at full load all the time, only three chillers on each tower are typically running at any given time—delivering significant energy savings and an 18-month payback for the project. When we analyzed this system, the data center chillers were running at 100 percent capacity and although the design called for 45-degree chilled water, it was delivering 34 to 35-degree chilled water.

In addition to improving the control system, this was a huge energy saving opportunity! We can now match data center chiller capacity to the exact cooling load and reset chilled water temperature back to the original design specifications. As a result, energy consumption dropped from about 2.0 kW per ton of cooling to 1.3 kW per ton, saving about $177,000 per month in energy costs. The project also qualified for $35,000 in rebates from the local utility company. Plus, the data center now has immediate backup capacity if any of the 10 chillers fail.”