Startup Core4 launches to cut data center cooling costs

Startup Core4 Systems made its public launch today with a system to much more efficiently cool data centers – an area of growing importance as data centers and their energy needs expand.

Knowing that roughly half of the energy consumed by data centers is devoted to cooling them, Core4 designed a system that the Napa, Calif. startup says can cut cooling energy costs up to 72%, having demonstrated it with its first customer.

Core4 approached its system design largely through applying to the data center cooling techniques from the refrigeration industry in an effort to unseat incumbent suppliers such as Liebert that came from the air-conditioning industry.

“The air-conditioning industry was built to operate when it was hot out – 1200 to 1800 hours a year – so it really didn’t matter if it was inefficient,” said Rick Cockrell, Core4’s chief technology officer and a veteran of the refrigeration industry. “It didn’t run long enough or have a good enough return on investment to put any money into it…If the food-production industry were run anywhere near the data-center industry’s efficiency, it would probably cost $30 for a McDonald’s hamburger.”

Cockrell’s last outfit, West Coast HVAC supplier Bell Products, provided what became Core4’s first seed funding – about $600,000 with which Cockrell chased an opportunity to cool the 5400-square-foot data center of Sonic.net, an Internet service provider in Santa Rosa, Calif. That deal won Core4 $619,000 in revenue and became the showcase for Core4’s public launch today; the 72% energy reduction number is backed by Sonic.net’s CEO.

“Mostly it just came from the fact that I like to prove everybody wrong,” Cockrell said.

Much of Core4’s promised energy savings comes from reduced compression, achieved in a number of ways. For example, typical systems today are based on air-side economizing, taking colder air from the outside and filtering it into the data center. Too much energy is expended filtering that outside air to keep the data center clean, Cockrell said. Core4 uses only internal air – in a method called refrigerant-side economizing – and avoids much of those filtering costs while dramatically cutting compressor energy consumption.

Core4 also uses outside wet-bulb temperatures – the temperature at which water begins to evaporate outside – rather than the higher dry bulb temperature, which allows its gear to continue economizing even on extremely hot, humid days when airside systems can’t.

Refrigerant-side economizing also cuts down on server and hard drive failures, which contribute to the volume of e-waste shipped to overseas landfills, Cockrell said.

Core4 also uses very large 28-inch angle-mounted fans, custom developed from the refrigeration industry to consume about a third the power of those used by incumbent providers. And it uses a very large moisture-collecting coil – 22 feet – designed to avoid forming moisture entirely where other systems pay to remove moisture and then pay to add moisture at other times to avoid letting the data center become too dry.

Core4 said its ripest target is market is that for retrofitting existing data centers, such as the Sonic.net win.

In an email, Jed Scaramella, senior research analyst at IDC, called Core4's approach an "innovative" one that is aimed at the premier pain point of data center managers.

"While the majority of [data center] customers are currently looking for smaller less disruptive changes with a comparatively large payback (hot/cold aisle configuration, virtualization, blanking panels), there are customers in a more dire situation that are seeking larger scale solutions to extend the life of their current data center," Scaramella said.