Yahoo Unveils ‘Chicken Coop’ Green Data Centre

Yahoo has opened a data centre which takes the design of a chicken coop as its inspiration, and promises to match the current world record for data centre efficiency.

The data centre is located in Lockport, in upstate New York near Niagara Falls, and follows current best practice in using outside air for most of its cooling, instead of running chillers to cool the server racks. Chillers are normally one of the most power-hungry devices in a conventional data centre.

Farmyard design

The three buildings making up the centre are shaped like chicken coops, long and narrow, with a cupola helping to direct the hot air from the interior toward the outside. Lockport is positioned between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie and the buildings are positioned in the path of lake winds.

Yahoo’s Chicken Coop has a power use effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.08, meaning that 92 percent of the power it consumes is used by the IT equipment, with 8 percent powering lights and operational equipment. Less than 1 percent of the power is used in cooling, Yahoo said. It said typical data centres have a PUE of 1.92.

This figure matches CapGemini’s Merlin data centre, which hosts the Environment Agency. Other low PUE data centres include Facebook at 1.15, for its Oregon centre.

Like the Merlin centre and Facebook’s plant, when air-cooling doesn’t suffice, Yahoo said it’s data cenre will rely on an evaporative cooling system. The design reduces overall costs by about 40 percent compared to the average and reduces water consumption by 95 percent, Yahoo said.

Faster to build

The centre, which consumes 15 megawatts, is powered by hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls provided by the New York Power Authority, and was subsidised by a $9.9 million ($6.3m) grant from the US Department of Energy, intended to encourage better power-usage practices. By contrast, FAcebook’s data centre has been the subject of criticism from Greenpeace for its use of coaol-fired electricity.

Yahoo said it is experimenting with other power-saving technologies in the facility, such as the use of LED lighting and flash memory storage systems.

The Chicken Coop also cost less to build and was constructed faster than average data centres, having been assembled on site from standardised, factory-made parts. Yahoo said it expects to build two additional halls at the Lockport site in six months, compared to an average 12 to 18 months needed for a traditional data centre.

That will bring the facility’s total floor space up to about 36,000 square feet, enough to house 50,000 servers. The site could eventually support 100,000 servers.

Pre-fabricated modular data centres are also available as a service from Colt.