Data Centre

The Data Centre Demonstrator, located at the premises of Bachmann (Stuttgart, Germany), will be set up in a container, housing two different compartments both supplied by the same DC distribution grid:

• A data center compartment where two server rack systems with different power delivery approaches will be demonstrated;
• An office compartment showcasing the edge approach. In this space, typical office equipment like laptops and monitors will be supplied by the DC grid and the area will be heated by the temperature generated by the servers in the server compartment.

This office area will be used for monitoring the data centre and the power flow on the DC grid. This solution is also to be tested and further developed in the context of smart buildings to primarily use renewable energy for the workplaces, conference- and meeting rooms.

Three Use-Cases (UCs) will be tested on the demonstrator:

• DC grid resilience. One of the most important KPIs for data centres is the uptime, typically regarding the power supply. Given the edge approach, this use case relies not only on local photovoltaic (PV) supply and battery, but also on a more complex load management of the additional systems integrated into the DC grid.
• Data centre scalability. In standard data centres, the power architecture needs to be built from the beginning for the full power, while the computation power can be scaled up as needed. In this Use Case, the scalability of the power architecture is to be evaluated.
• Sector coupling: Getting rid of the excess heat of the servers is a key task in data centres. Usually this heat is just vented, adding towards climate change. In this demonstrator, reuse of the heat will be explored.

Demo Leader: FRAUNHOFER
Participants: INESC ID, EDF, SCHNEIDER, NEXANS, CIRCE, BACHMANN, HIRO-MicroDataCenters , EATON, TALTECH, JJCOOLING, PCB DESIGN