With rising energy costs, IT administrators are struggling to find ways to cool their data centers without breaking the bank on their energy costs. At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a team of scientists has successfully tested a novel system they say could greatly improve the efficiency of data center cooling, according to an article from Computerworld.com.

If it works in the long term, it will be a welcome change because the cost of cooling IT systems accounts for nearly half the cost of running the average data center. The engineers at Lawrence Berkeley, working with Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Emerson Network Power, have been experimenting with a way to deliver just the right amount of cooling to computing equipment.

Instead of blanket cooling, they are feeding temperature readings from sensors that are built into the data-center building controls. The IT equipment is also directly linked to the cooling system, improving efficiency.

"The main goal we had was to show that you could do this, that you could use the sensors in the IT equipment to control the building
systems, and we achieved that," said Bill Tschudi, a program manager at Lawrence Berkeley.

For more on cooling data centers:
- check out this Computerworld.com article

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