Pentadyne Joins Sun Microsystems and Others in Data Center Power Demo
Pentadyne Power Corp. announced its participation in a milestone demonstration project at the Sun Microsystems' campus in Silicon Valley to prove that the nation's data centers can conserve massive amounts of energy and drastically reduce their utility bills by using direct current (dc) architecture to run power-hungry servers connected to the Internet.
The best minds on energy and data center issues – including researchers and system engineers at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California Energy Commission, Sun Microsystems, Intel, Cisco, Pentadyne and others – joined together to develop a working demonstration to prove how the nation's data centers could amass billions of dollars in utility savings by using dc architecture that would conserve thousands of gigawatt-hours of energy per year. One gigawatt-hour is enough energy to power more than 60,000 average homes for a year.
The technology demonstration is being conducted at Sun Microsystems in Newark, Calif. Pentadyne supplied the flywheel-based clean energy storage system connected to a rectifier that converts the incoming utility grid ac into 400v dc power. Pentadyne's fast spinning composite flywheel replaces conventional UPS (uninterruptible power supply) battery banks that store energy to seamlessly continue power to the data center equipment in the event of a blackout or other power disturbance.
The demonstration project proves that using dc power instead of alternating current (ac) can reduce energy needed to run data centers by up to 20% and improve overall system reliability. Servers from major manufacturers have been tested to operate within the dc architecture.
"Powering and cooling today's data centers has become a critical factor as new high-density blade servers come on the scene while energy costs are at all-time highs," said Pentadyne President and CEO, Mark McGough. "The traditional approach of using AC power and chemical batteries in large data centers will no longer be a viable solution in the near term. Combining DC-powered equipment with clean energy storage flywheel-UPS systems eliminates costly, maintenance-laden and polluting batteries, radically cuts cooling system needs and the energy to run those systems, and improves overall server reliability while dramatically reducing floorspace needs. We're very pleased to be a part of this very significant technology demonstration."
Interested parties will be able to tour the demonstration facility by appointment at the Sun Microsystems campus in Newark, California, through August 2006.
