CHEONAN, South Chungcheong Province ― KT and Intel opened a test bed for an energy-efficient data center for the first time in Korea on Tuesday.

The nation’s biggest fixed-line service provider said the two firms have worked together since late 2010 to operate a data center that runs at high temperatures to save energy and lower costs.

“The data center in Cheonan is the first one to apply this energy-saving technology and the application will be expanded to other data centers operated by KT nationwide and we plan to offer related consultation services for further business,” said Yun Dong-sik, senior vice president of cloud service bureau at KT.

According to Yun, KT will raise the temperature of the data server rooms to 30 degrees Celsius from the current 22 degrees Celsius, cutting electricity use from air conditioning by up to 59 percent.

“If we apply it to all 10 data centers owned by KT, we will be able to save about 8.6 billion won ($7.6 million) and we will also be able to cut down 44.8 billion won in electricity use when counting all data centers in the country,” he said.

As part of the plan, the firm will conduct a test utilizing the High Temperature Ambient technology this year and then move to apply it to all servers within its Cheonan Cloud Computing Center next year.

The move will be expanded to all KT’s data centers in 2014.

Joining the move, Intel will design the server platforms for the next-generation data centers, applying its technologies called Node Manager and Data Center Manager, said Intel Korea country manager Lee Hee-sung.

“We have done simulations at KT’s data center in Mok-dong, Seoul, and learned that it reduced 27 percent of costs there,” said Lee. “The test center has been launched and Intel plans to continuously offer a standardized model while testing the managing environment together with KT in Cheonan.”

By Cho Ji-hyun (sharon@heraldcorp.com)