Eco Friendly

In an effort to improve on energy efficiency and lower the Carbon emissions of Synergy House and its other facilities, UK Grid has teamed up with Data Racks to deploy its Cold aisle Containment system. UK Grid will be the first Data Centre provider in Manchester to deploy this method to help reduce its carbon footprint. UK Grid has also chosen to use the highly efficient 80-NET UPS system from award winning Chloride Power.

Cold Aisle Containment

Cold aisle Containment is a sytem that makes sure cooled air is delivered to rack mounted equipment directly as there are many factors within a rack or aisle that can affect the flow of cooled air.

The system also prevents the warm air from getting into the cooled air aisles by using a containment system thus creating a cold aisle and a hot aisle.

How does Cold Aisle Containment work?

How does Cold aisle Containment work? Within the cold aisle, blanking plates are clipped into each rack where equipment is not located and also to the bottom of the rack. This prevents cold air from leaking through to the warm air and vice versa. Blanking plates are installed from the top of the rack to the finished ceiling in the cold aisle, or a lightweight plastic cover is placed between the two rows of racks in the cold aisle to make a cold corridor. This way the cold air can't escape and mix with the hot air unless it is sucked through the server and into the warm aisle. This also prevents warm air re-circulating back into the cold aisle.

What are the results?

Tests are still ongoing in a major London Data Centre that has already deployed this system and preliminary results, that we will soon publish, have shown a 75 kW reduction in power usage for a 300 rack area.

These results re-enforce UK Grid strategy to make 1 Synergy House’s cooling system more efficient, thus resulting in a large decrease in power utilisation required for cooling.

80-NET UPS System

The 80-NET UPS system chosen by UK Grid has unprecedented power conversion efficiency, up to 100% (unity), leading to considerable energy savings throughout its service life.

This high efficiency of power conversion represents a one third reduction on the energy loses against other manufacturers UPS systems.

The UPS is fully compliant with the European Code of Conduct for UPS Efficiency and Chloride have recently won the European UPS Company of the Year.