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DOE Picks Eaton and HP for $7.4 M IT Efficiency Grant

  • Jan 18, 2010

Eaton Corporation is collaborating with HP on a federally funded project to improve energy efficiency in information technology (IT) systems.

Among the 14 projects chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy, the joint proposal will receive a $7.4 million grant.

The project will develop a fully enclosed IT rack system that provides its own internal power and cooling. High voltage and chilled water will act as the primary inputs to the system, and it will accept alternative energy power sources, such as wind and solar power. A major benefit of this system is a 38 percent reduction in energy use to support a 100 kilowatt (kW) IT load, which equals a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 400 tons annually.

"HP and Eaton are working to introduce new technologies that will help businesses reduce power consumption by as much as 40 percent, lower costs and extend the life of data centers, decreasing the need for new facilities," said Doug Oathout, vice president of Converged Infrastructure, HP. "With this grant, Eaton and HP's combined expertise will enable us to create an innovative technology solution that increases energy efficiency and meets government mandates to reduce carbon emissions while diminishing the need to build new power plants to support data centers."

The grant is funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which will pay for development and demonstration projects in equipment and software, power supply chain and cooling.

Comments

Tue, Jun 22, 2010

A few additional interesting points to note…

The HP/Eaton joint DOE project will be very compact and will be designed to fit into an existing data center—rather than replacing or expanding a data center. This container will be in 100kW increments and can be distributed over a four, six, or eight rack setup (the cooling unit adds another two racks to those numbers) ranging from 12.5kW in the eight-rack configuration up to 25kW per rack in the four-rack configuration.

The flexibility of where this can be deployed is a noteworthy point. As long as power and water are made available, this solution can go into a raised floor environment, into a remote office site, co-lo, or even onto a concrete slab.

This solution would lead to better use of existing data centers, making portions more efficient from the IT equipment through to cooling, since the DOE project will be self-contained with power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.25 or lower. The entire system can be configured-to-order with the software, hardware, power and cooling systems ready to go—so that it can just be rolled into place and turned on.

All that combined means that the DOE project will be a very compact, highly-efficient, easily deployed IT to power to cooling solution for existing data centers, co-located environments, or remote sites.

Ron Mann
HP
Director Engineering, Rack & Power Infrastructure

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