676_ Dear Ned, I saw your blog recommending setting data center thermostats to 75°
We couldn't help but ask, "Do you really do that? And if so, how's that working out?" Ned and Trent got into a very eye-opening discussion. Ned McClain and Trent Hein, co-founders of Applied Trust Engineering have launched a new series called, "Dear Ned...I'm in over my head". Ned went onto say, "We really care about the environment - we're concerned about conservation and using the least amount of energy needed to do business in our normal ways, but overall in this economic environment we should all be concerned about saving money. Turning up the thermostat in your data center can save a lot of cost on cooling and air conditioning. This heating, ventilation, air-conditioning cost is a tremendous part of data centers. Sometimes 50% of all the energies you spend on your data centers isn't running the computers but is keeping those computers cool. We visit a lot of data centers that were built in the 70's,80's or 90's and computers built in the 70's really needed to be kept cold. But computers built in the late 90's or 2000's have a lot more tolerance for heat. So when you walk into a data center that's really cold and you see only modern hardware, there's a gap there. Those folks are probably operating with 1980's practices for keeping their data centers at 70°F or lower when in fact they could probably turn it up 5 or 10 or more degrees and save 100s or thousands of dollars each year. Then they talk about Google...
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