(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — “Quick Start” technology from energy efficiency solutions provider Johnson Controls (www.johnsoncontrols.com) is helping RagingWire Enterprise Solutions (www.ragingwire.com) ensure reliability and improve energy efficiency at its Sacramento, California, data center, making it the first data center in the world to install the Quick Start feature.
According to carrier neutral colocation and custom IT hosting provider RagingWire in its Friday announcement, Johnson Controls’ Quick Start software shortens chiller restart time after power failures by as much as 75 percent, quickly re-establishing the designated chilled-water temperature to keep equipment cooled and reducing the risk of expensive downtime.
Quick Start is an essential element for process applications and data centers like RagingWire’s 200,000-square-foot, enterprise-class data center. It offers highly reliable and scalable power, cooling and physical-security solutions that host Fortune 1000 companies’ mission-critical IT applications and infrastructure. RagingWire worked closely with Johnson Controls to jointly test this new capability.
The Quick Start feature has reduced the time required for chiller restart and return to chilled-water from 13 minutes to as little as 2.5 minutes during power interruptions or utility transitions. The quick return to the specified leaving chilled-water temperature lets RagingWire to raise its chilled-water temperature by five degrees, providing round-the-clock energy savings because the temperature no longer need to be set artificially low in case of a power failure.
“The Quick Start technology has been the cornerstone of our chiller efficiency program,” RagingWire senior facility manager Jim Kennedy said in a statement. “This feature provides us with the redundancy and reliability our clients require. By enabling us to increase our chilled water temperature setpoint by 5 degrees, the feature also saves as many as four million kilowatt-hours annually in our 24/7 environment. That translates to savings in the neighborhood of $320,000.”
The Quick Start feature is available for YORK centrifugal chillers equipped with OptiSpeed variable-speed drive. The chiller plant at the RagingWire EDC consists of six YORK centrifugal chillers from Johnson Controls, each retrofitted with the Quick Start feature. The plant can provide up to 6,300 tons of cooling capacity to meet the facility’s N + 2 redundancy requirements across all systems.
