Free cooling in data centers is not of small interest at Intel by any measure and the processor maker is motivated by real numbers in its effort to maximize the use of airside economization in its mission-critical facilities.

In a 2008 study done at a 10MW data center, the company learned it could achieve a reduction in energy consumption of more than 70%, which translated into $2.8m in savings.

Intel is now looking to realize similar savings in other parts of its infrastructure, starting in 2011 with another 10MW facility in Folsom, California (Sacramento area), said Charles Rego, a data center architect at Intel. Rego and his team are looking for a way to go completely chiller-free at the facility that currently uses a combination of chillers and a waterside economizer.

Rego spoke at the DatacenterDynamics conference in Dallas on 6 December.

The central challenge of the project is finding the right tools to monitor and automate facilities management. "What’s the right set of instrumentations that isn’t costing you half a million dollars to put in to be able to measure and monitor," Rego said, describing the task ahead.

The other piece of the puzzle is identifying what maximum air temperature on the computer floor each data center will allow and if it is not already there, raising the temperature to that maximum. Higher inlet-air temperatures allow a facility to use more outside air for cooling.

Finding the right instrumentation is key because if a data center can use free cooling 90% of the year, for example, its operators are left with the challenge of dealing with "excursions", or sudden changes in load and, subsequently, in demand for cooling capacity, for the remaining 10% of the year.

Thus, finding the right instrumentation will rely a lot on understanding workloads in the data center, Rego said. It will allow the facility’s operators to keep overall temperature at a maximum, while identifying and addressing excursions individually.