Data centers of Microsoft get may racks with fuel cells

Microsoft is going to be a rackontwerp test that is provided to the fuel cell on the basis of methane gas. This design should make for more environmentally friendly and more reliable data centers that are separate from the power grid to operate. Also, would the cost drop significantly.

The application of fuel cells in data centers makes it according to Microsoft as possible, to save costs, because (among other reasons, ups and distribution systems for electricity are no longer needed. In addition, with the integration of fuel cells in a data centre, the ‘power plant’ directly in the building, so less power is lost during the transport, with benefits for the environment and the power bill as a result. Also the reliability would be higher: companies that such fuel cells provide promise uptimes of 99.999 percent, compared to 99.9 percent that the average power company promises.

According to researchers at Microsoft, that their plans in a white paper to describe is a fuel cell on the basis of methane gas on rackniveau that a few kW’s of power supplies are most efficient. Smaller fuel cells at the server level would be too costly, while a large fuel cell for the entire data center, the systems makes them vulnerable if the fuel cell is found to be defective. The creation of the necessary distributiepijpen for the supply of methane gas to the racks would be considerably cheaper than the regular infrastructure for the required electricity.

Microsoft is experimenting for some time with a data center in the U.s. location Cheyenne, where the computing centre of the methane gas harnessed from a nearby water treatment plant. It is, however, still not on rackniveau with fuel cells worked. To think further, the researchers of Microsoft Research that fuel cells based on hydrogen is still not interesting because the storage and distribution is still difficult and expensive, but the use of biogas would not be a problem.

The researchers think that the tests that the software giant wants to go run with the custom racks the total cost of ownership of a datacenter compared to a traditional setting with a minimum of 20 percent could lower. However, it is recognised that there is still a lot of hooks and eyes to the design and that there are in practice likely to have the necessary modifications to the design are needed before it is optimized. Nevertheless, think of the Microsoft researchers on methane gas running data centers that are independent of the mains running to play a major role in the future.