Zero Water Consumption Cooling
For many years, data centers have used various water-consuming cooling methods, such as water towers and evaporative cooling, in order to reduce electricity costs. With the common industry focus on Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), shifting the cooling burden from electricity to water meant that a facility could achieve a low PUE because the water was invisible to the calculation.
While this does achieve the objective of reducing energy impacts, the concentration of many servers into a single hyperscale data center also concentrates the water consumption into one watershed. Many of these centers are located in areas where water is scarce, or will be in the future.
At CyrusOne, all of our newly-built data centers are designed with zero water consumption cooling. This means no water towers, no evaporative cooling, and very low water use. While small amounts of water are still used for humidification, facility maintenance, and domestic water, this is minor compared to facilities that use water for cooling.
Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) – the ratio of water used at the data center to the electricity delivered to the IT hardware – is a common measurement of how efficiently a data center uses water. While some companies strive to get a WUE below a 1.3, CyrusOne operates ten data centers with a WUE of 1.1 or less.
Download the CyrusOne Waterless Cooling Whitepaper