How to cut the cost of data centres
Chris Smith, Sales & Marketing Director looks at how to cut the cost of data centres.
Is monitoring data centres the most difficult task in IT? Understanding how to manage data centre inputs such as power, cooling and efficiency requirements has often fallen between different functions - that of IT, building services and facilities management teams. However, recent developments suggest help is at hand.
A recent on365 monitoring project for a global data centre provider offers real hope to IT professionals struggling to implement efficient green business strategies. The project showed real possibilities for areas such as improved cooling, data centre space saving, disaster recovery, energy efficiency and consumption monitoring.
The project highlighted opportunities for companies to halve the number of air conditioning units in the server room that were currently being used to cool rising equipment operating temperatures - in a data centre running thousand of servers. In fact, on365 has seen that, as was the case for this customer, many centres are supported by old UPS which run at only 80% efficiency and effectively waste 20% of energy on simply running themselves. This has a huge impact on the amount of wasted power and extra heat in the server room, which, in turn, requires additional energy and equipment to be cooled, putting increased pressure on the cooling units.
Apart from taking up less space in the actual data centre, investing in a new UPS could mean optimising the energy usage to 96% efficiency and reducing the loss to 4% - a major reduction that will impact the organisation's overall power consumption and required cooling support.
The wider question of managing power and reducing energy consumption is often restricted by a number of complex issues. Data centres can use up to 50 times as much power as the equivalent business office space and average facility in the UK will pay a power bill of around £1m per year.
The changing demands that an organisation places on its complex data centre infrastructure must be viewed as a central part of its risk management - whether it adopts a declared green IT strategy or not. With the ever-present outsourcing of supply chains, changing corporate property portfolios and duplicate locations for disaster recovery; power supplies and data centres have increasingly complex management responsibilities which are divided up between facilities management (FM), building services and IT. This is further complicated by inter-departmental responsibilities over power and maintenance - particularly surrounding which department should cover which cost.
There is also a pressing need to address the UK's Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme for the 6,000 largest public and private sector organisations. The tax is forcing organisations to develop energy management strategies to cut costs and COD emissions. Implementing such enforced strategies still requires investment in energy usage monitoring tools and the setup of areas such as computing infrastructures to operate in a more efficient way.
However, this type of legislation is not limited to UK companies. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy's Energy Star programme helps companies implement energy management strategies that involve measuring energy performance, goal setting, tracking of savings and rewarding improvements.
Across Europe, the European Commission launched in 2005 the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), a cornerstone of the European Union's policy to combat climate change and reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions cost effectively. The policy's cap and trade principle puts a limit on the total amount of certain greenhouse gases that can be emitted by factories, power plants and other installations in the system. The limit on emissions is tightened over time, leading to a 21% reduction in emissions to 2010 over 2005 levels.
To ease the compliance burden from such government-led change, several initiatives both voluntary and governmental are helping companies through the maze of reliability, energy efficiency and sustainability issues. Organisations such as The Carbon Trust and initiatives such as the EU Code of Conduct on Data Centre Energy Efficiency are there to offer practical advice.
The Carbon Trust provides interest free unsecured loans to cover the cost of investing in energy efficiency based on a business case and efficiency targets. The loans can be paid over a period of up to 4 years with no immediate payout or investment, offering strong return on investment (ROI) benefits. They are a very favourable tool in reducing a company's energy consumption and driving green strategies.
Launched in 2009, the European Union Code of Conduct on Data Centres Energy Efficiency (DCiE) is regarded as one of the most practical guides in IT operations. The code marked the first attempt to set out benchmarks such as DCiE, power usage effectiveness (PUE) and now water usage (WUE) to help both public sector and business measure efficiency and optimise the operation of their data centre, while reducing the infrastructure's environmental demands.
The Green Grid announced new standards for carbon emissions through carbon usage effectiveness (CUE) and water usage through WUE sustainability metrics. The new standards for assessing environmental impact will give companies a more practical framework for reporting data centres' sustainability, ahead of tougher restrictions to face companies. The WUE standard is particularly welcome because most organisations struggle to include an allowance for water consumption in their PUE calculations alone. These metrics on water usage in data centre cooling will help IT Managers better understand the relative impacts of different cooling systems - whether it's water usage from direct or indirect evaporation-based cooling or high energy mechanical IT infrastructure cooling.
The majority of power plants and data centre infrastructures do not have sufficient capabilities to measure their complex and growing environments. Departmental managers therefore need to work more closely with their colleagues in other departments to determine responsibilities for monitoring buildings' and data centres' environmental impacts. Companies can also invest in energy usage monitoring tools to operate more energy efficiently.
The rise in energy compliance issues for large firms has stimulated growth in companies that specialise in optimising power, utilities and physical IT infrastructures for data centre and facilities managers. These companies are now providing a portfolio of infrastructure management services that can monitor electricity usage in power plants and data centres to provide data centre and facilities managers with a more effective overview. Specialists in this area provide comprehensive IT support capabilities, encompassing installation, system testing, network integration, on-site maintenance and audit/review services.
Global energy efficiency compliance demands and green initiatives that organisations need to meet require effective co-operation to tackle energy consumption reduction across the organisation. This is, of course, a daunting and demanding task as daily workloads will often conspire against inter-departmental collaborations.
However, given the step changes over the last 18 months in power plant/data centre asset management, monitoring and evaluation, there is now a more realistic prospect of successful collaboration between building management, power plant and ICT systems to enable comprehensive measurement of business energy usage. Most crucially, managers will be able to analyse the data these systems generate and develop improvement to impact positively on the whole organisation. The path to monitoring energy use is not an easy one but there is support in place to make it clearer now than ever before.
