LANTANA LED innovates lighting for hyperscale and colocation data centers, minimizing costs and increasing safety.
Project Frog has sponsored this post.
The evolution of a data-driven world has changed how people live and how businesses operate. The explosion of cloud computing is creating the need for massive data center capacity to handle that data.
“Our entire digital economy is based on the idea that there is computing power available anytime, anywhere,” said Samuel Rabinowitz, LANTANA LED CEO. “There is a misconception that there is a ‘cloud’ floating somewhere out there with unlimited capacity. But this activity actually occurs within a physical location known as a data center. These days, a data center is more like a massive warehouse storing and processing billions of gigabytes of information for billions of people worldwide. Every byte of digital information, including email, online shopping, social media and even online gaming, is stored on servers within a data center.”
“Think about SaaS software, AI, cloud services, self-driving cars. All of that information, processing power, and communication transpires in a physical location behind the digital interface that you see and interact with as a consumer.”
The vital need for data centers, dedicated buildings, or space that houses IT servers and equipment has quickly become an industry in itself. The U.S. alone has 2,701 data centers, with around 100 under construction or launched yearly since 2021. Large tech companies such as Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and others are building hyperscale data centers for their own purposes. Hyperscale data centers typically exceed 10,000 square feet, contain more than 5,000 housed servers and offer a minimum of 40MW of capacity; anything smaller is classified as a colocation or enterprise data center.
Those big numbers come with big complications during new construction or refreshes and renovations. As a purpose-built structure, a data center’s construction must meet numerous power requirements, especially those related to cooling and security. Typically, the metric has been Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), which measures energy efficiency of the data center by dividing the total power draw of a data center by the power used to run IT equipment within it. While lighting may seem low on the list of priorities, it can make a big impact on much more than just providing visibility in a data center The choice of lighting can influence the costs of material and labor, the ability to recoup wattage and driving down the PUE, and the safety of employees and sensitive equipment.
In Meta’s 2021 sustainability report, the company indicated that it used 7.17 million megawatt-hours of electricity for the year, 6.97 million of which were for data centers. That level of power consumption has companies and builders looking for innovative ways to cut costs, as well as address other challenges.
Challenges of Building a Data Center
The construction industry continues to battle issues outside of its control, namely supply chain issues and labor shortages. Recent estimates indicate that the latter equates to a shortage of 546,000 workers. An aging workforce and a new generation of workers going to other industries instead of the trades have made building anything more difficult and time-consuming. With data demands increasing, leading to increased demand for purpose-built structures, labor issues have become even more prevalent.
“For the companies building these massive data center campuses at a million square feet, it requires anywhere from 300 to 500 electricians on site daily,” Rabinowitz said. “And that’s just one site. Meanwhile, one customer may have twelve different sites they’re building simultaneously. Intel is building an enormous campus in Arizona that requires 3,000 skilled tradespeople. This is where we run up against a significant problem: lack of labor. How do we have enough electricians to do all of this work, and how do they impact project costs? Why use a skilled electrician to install a light fixture when a low-voltage technician, who costs 25%less, can install that fixture? Instead, let’s let the skilled electricians focus on other critical path items.”
Even when a construction company has enough personnel, contractors and subcontractors to complete construction, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic still linger. While other types of businesses have finally felt some reprieve in supply chain issues, data centers have seen an increase in disruptions. These supply shortages range from heavy equipment to individual component hardware. For a state-of-the-art facility to run efficiently, it needs highly specialized IT hardware to make real-time data collection happen. Chips, in particular, have become a vital need. Unfortunately, many of these specialized chips come from overseas vendors, resulting in long delays which can start at the raw material level and cascade through manufacturing and delivery.
Building a data center also requires adhering to efficiency and sustainability standards. No matter the type of company, a business must incorporate social, environmental and governance issues into its practices to meet the demands of customers, investors, officials and more. That means planning and creating strategies to minimize the carbon footprint, water consumption and heat waste, hand-in-hand is driving energy efficiency.
As the number of people relying on digital services increases, so does the number of required data centers. According to the United States Department of Energy’s Annual Energy Outlook, 2020, one large data center can require as much electricity as 80,000 US households and can consume between 10-50 times more energy than a typical office building. It is the biggest expense that data centers face. Companies are relying on environmental building assessments to help decrease those numbers as well as turning to innovators, such as LANTANA LED, to achieve critical path and sustainability goals.
LANTANA LED’s Low-voltage Lighting Solution
Thanks to the advent of LED lights, lighting is safer, more efficient, and better able to withstand the heat generated in a data center’s interior.
“Data centers these days are beginning to operate at higher and higher interior temperatures to reduce cooling requirements. The chips themselves in these computers have evolved to be denser with higher compute power, generating more heat,” Rabinowitz said. “We’ve gone from the CPU to the GPU. We’ve gone from 5-kilowatt server racks to 15-, to 20-, to 30-plus kilowatt server racks. Even the ASHRAE standards themselves are evolving to meet the changing heat standards in data centers. Hot aisles are getting hotter, operating at 90-100+ degrees Fahrenheit. At LANTANA LED we focus on energy-efficient solutions that are also certified to operate in excessive hot aisle temperature environments.”
LANTANA LED has taken LED lighting even further by developing an accompanying low-voltage DC power system. In essence, LANTANA LED removed the LED driver from the fixture itself and put it into a central remote driver unit which sits offsite from the fixture, such as at the end of an aisle. This unit becomes the only point at which an electrician is required to run AC power. Because the power inversion occurs in the remote driver unit and not on the fixture itself, the primary source of heat from fixtures is relocated away from hot aisles. This centralized source of power offers several advantages, including savings between $2-$5 per square foot for materials and labor, and a safer working environment. LED fixtures that work with the remote driver unit can operate at much higher ambient operating temperatures.
“Because of these higher temperature ratings, the low-voltage power system can be used through the entire data center in both hot and cold aisles. Rabinowitz said. “Along with being energy efficient, the remote driver unit is designed to withstand 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Plus, our remote LED fixtures are certified for up to 70 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit).”
LANTANA LED’s remote DC power system was also specifically designed to be interchangeable with a wide variety of controls packages, including emergency, occupancy, daylight harvesting, and RFID sensors. Many data centers use occupancy sensors to decrease energy costs by automatically activating lights only when an occupant is working in the space. While many occupancy sensors use passive infrared technology (PIR) to detect occupants, with rising temperatures in data centers this technology can become less effective. An alternative to the traditional PIR occupancy sensors are microwave sensors. Microwave occupancy sensors use high-frequency radio waves rather than heat sensing to indicate when the lights should turn on or off.
From a material standpoint, with the remote driver unit it is no longer necessary to run conduits to each individual fixture to wire them. That means saving time and money with fewer materials and less skilled labor to run vast amounts of conduit. Working with low voltage is also far safer; the higher the voltage, the higher the risk of electrical arc flashes. Electrical arcs can heat the air to temperatures as high as 35,000° Fahrenheit, literally vaporizing metal in the equipment and causing severe burns or even death. From an operation standpoint, maintenance personnel in the data center no longer have to replace the LED driver within the fixture, potentially facing the risk entering unsafe working temperature conditions, or of falling or damaging equipment.
While any system has upfront costs, lifecycle savings come from the longevity of the LEDs and operational costs. LANTANA LED invested time, energy, and resources to use the latest technology and LED chips with the most energy-efficient options that last up to 54 years. While a competitor may have 130 lumens per watt, LANTANA LED provides up to 164.7 lumens per watt, allowing owners to repurpose the wattage savings for servers. Additionally, the company typically saves customers up to $5 per square foot on installation costs.
Although lighting only makes a small dent in the PUE ratio, the maintenance, operation, material, and labor savings quickly add up. Once installed, data centers can focus their sustainability efforts on other aspects of their business during new construction, renovation, or operations.
To learn more about LED lighting solutions, visit LANTANA LED.
