“WE SATURATED THE POWER ENVELOPE BY PUTTING TWICE AS MANY SYSTEMS AS WE WOULD NORMALLY HAVE, IF IT HAD A NORMAL WAY OF COOLING”
Installation Details
- Location: Houston, Texas, USA
- Industry: Oil & Gas
- Capacity (in MW): Undisclosed
- Energy Savings: 50% reduction in total energy consumption
- Highlight: Doubled the number of servers supported by the existing (power) infrastructure
- Customer Since: 2010
The Challenge
Viridien owned a 10,000 square foot, legacy data center that had been mothballed due to obsolescence, including things such as limitations of the available power envelope and an extremely inefficient Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of >2.0. As a matter of fact, half of the energy usage was to power the traditional air-cooling infrastructure. Viridien’s goal was to retrofit the datacenter without any downtime to other systems or their network, minimize capital expenditures by deferring them over time and limiting ongoing OPEX.
The GRC Solution
After careful analysis & consideration, Viridien selected GRC and it’s patented immersion cooling solution, ICEraQ, due to their unique ability to meet all their stated goals. The tailored solution included 4 x 42U racks with 100kW cooling capacity (25kW per rack), which were installed with 8 weeks of the initial order.
Results
By Installing the ICEraQ system, Viridien realized these key benefits:
- Avoided purchasing new, capital-intensive cooling equipment
- Built out the required cooling capacity in 100kW increments, eliminating downtime
- Achieved a 50% reduction in total data center energy usage
- Utilized the existing power envelope, avoiding the time and expanse of increasing it
- Doubled the number of servers hosted in the facility and the per rack heat load capacity
- Reduced noise levels, eliminating the need for ear protection for operators
A Closer Look:
Check out this immersion-Cooled Data Center with our Panoramic Viewer
Check out this immersion-Cooled Data Center with our Panoramic Viewer
Testimonials:
“What we are seeing is a significant saving in terms of electricity. I would say it’s not impossible to go up to a factor of two. So you gain essentially 50% of the electricity.”
“Today there is not really much difference between managing this room and managing another traditional air based computer. Some of the differences as you can see because we’re right in the middle of this room, and it is producing as we speak, there’s no noise, almost no noise, the temperature is very reasonable, there’s no air draft, there’s none of the things you would normally associate with a very high density computer. So that makes for a much nicer environment overall.”
— Laurent Clerc, VP of Information Technology at Viridien
About Viridien:
Viridien has been a pioneer in the advancement of geophysics since the original company was created in 1931. Viridien is a fully integrated Geoscience company providing leading geological, geophysical and reservoir capabilities to its broad base of customers primarily from the global oil and gas industry.
