Data centers are particularly impacted by the economics of waste heat. Data centers around the globe spend more money on the energy and equipment to cool their servers and other electronic components than on the components themselves.
The Cogenerating NanoCooler will cool air via the refrigeration effect and convert half of the heat energy emitted by the data center’s electronic components into electricity. As a result, the data center heat load will be cut in half and the NanoCooler will generate one half of the electricity required to power the servers and other electronic components. The architectural flexibility inherent to the NanoCooler allows for any form factor including CRAC, rack cooling, or cold plate.
The economic impact of the Cogenerating NanoCooler will be twofold:
- The utility cost to power the servers and other electronic components will be cut in half.
- The number of servers and other electronic components can be doubled with the existing infrastructure.
To assess the value of the Cogenerating NanoCooler, we will consider the utility savings and the infrastructure savings over a 10-year life cycle. Supposing a 42U rack is half-filled, with 21 500 W servers (10.5 kW) and the national average cost of $0.10 per W, the total utility bill savings will be $4,380 per server or $91,980 per rack.
FFor data center infrastructure costs, we rely on the Uptime Institute’s calculation that a tier 4 data center’s amortized cost is $1,100 per year per 1U server. Over the 10-year life cycle of our NanoCooled server rack, the per-server infrastructure costs are reduced by $5,500, or by $115,500 per half-filled rack. Adding these two areas of savings, we arrive at a valuation that can be placed on the Cogenerating NanoCooler of $9,880 per server or $207,480 per half filled rack.
If our pricing model allowed us to split the financial benefits with the data center, potential profits for each rack cooler would be in the range of $100,000 per rack unit, and possibly more, as we anticipate that the use of Cogenerating NanoCoolers may be required by law in some countries to reduce electrical power demand.
Gartner’s most recent compilation of server sales statistics (see table below) indicates that 2010 Q2 saw a 27.1% increase in servers shipped, to 2.1 million. If we assume only new rack sales with 21 servers per rack for the first 4 years, the potential annual profits for the Cogenerating NanoCooler will be approximately $40 billion.
