Lonely Planet Labs

Lonely Planet’s Green Server Room

nigeldaltonLonely Planet author

by Julian Nikadie

It has always irked me that we have air conditioners running in the Lonely Planet server room 24 hours a day, every day of the year – even when we’re running heaters to warm the rest of the building. Such a waste of energy.

The need to redesign the server room to allow us to host some critical services gave us the opportunity to consider alternatives.

Wouldn’t it make sense to run the air conditioners only in Melbourne’s summer months? Could we vent the hot air from the server room to the rest of the building in Winter?

The reactions from the vendors we discussed our plans with ranged from a puzzled “Now, why would you want to do that?” to enthusiasm.

Inevitably there was the guy who nodded, said it seemed logical, and that he’d submit a proposal to us … that proposal was not only about six times what the budget would allow, it was a totally traditional, isolated server room that would require the air conditioners to run 24 hours a day – with no comment at all about the variation from what we’d discussed, and he seemed genuinely surprised that we didn’t respond immediately with a purchase order!

One of the enthusiastic vendors really latched on to the “waste of energy” comment we made while discussing why we didn’t want to simply increase the amount of cooling we had in the room.

“Ah! We’ve got just what you’re after … ”  [shuffle through brochures] “… here’s a new system that’s a twist on evaporative cooling – it uses less power to cool the room!”. Now, using less power to cool the server room was certainly better than our current system, but wasn’t it simply a more efficient way of wasting energy?

We wanted to use that energy to heat the building. He couldn’t help us there.

And then came  Anbro. Recommended by one of the vendors we were considering for the supply of a generator, Anbro was described as willing to listen and to consider offbeat ideas.

They came as a swarm. It seemed like there were a dozen fluoro-vested guys buzzing around discussing every aspect of the current systems (both within the server room and in the rest of the building). They had Bob running all over the place collecting plans and ladders. They were keen. They hadn’t done anything like this before, but it was logical, simple, and everyone should be doing it!

When their Warm Air Redirection System (WARS) proposal appeared in my email,  I skipped to the dollars part  (having been burned by the earlier pseudo-green proposal),… it couldn’t be right, it was not only less expensive than the pseudo-green proposal it was the best value of all of the proposals we’d received.

As I read the rest of the document (with that FGTH tune going through my head every time I saw the WARS abbreviation) it dawned on me … not only would this system save money through cheaper on-going running costs (since all of the other solutions had to install extra cooling to provide redundancy against the failure of a single air conditioner) – this proposal needed to provide sufficient cooling (for summertime), but the air conditioning and WARS could be used to back each other up. The fans, filters, ducts, vents, dampers and control circuits that would constitute the WARS were less expensive than providing a redundant air conditioner!

Why doesn’t everyone do this? Less expensive to install, less expensive to run, and Green! So, while war is good for “absolutely nothing”, WARS is proven greatness.