Managing Data Centre Power & Cooling Complexities
Chris Smith, Sales & Marketing Director at on365 takes a look at how power and cooling complexities can be managed in the Data Centre.
Data centres are responsible for at least one per cent of global electricity consumption, and by 2020 carbon emissions from data centres are expected to quadruple. The UK government has stepped in with its ‘green agenda,’ announcing its fourth carbon budget in May 2011 and the implementation of the Carbon Reduction Commitment with first carbon emission reports due in July 2011. Increased costs, reputational risk and tighter regulations are all driving an ever-increasing focus on energy efficiency in data centres, but with complexities rising, how can data centre managers get to grips with everything?
Power and cooling are critical services within a data centre facility, yet ensuring it is run whilst navigating the maze of compliance and adhering to the social responsibility to be ‘green’, is increasingly difficult. The broader question of managing power and cooling in addition to this is further 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 an average facility in the UK will pay a power bill of around £1million per year. Exasperating the issue further, research by Loughborough University and on365 shows that key company experts are routinely excluded from energy efficiency programmes. The survey results found that more than half of data centre managers never see the corporate electricity bill and therefore lack the information to assess energy use and with it, start cutting carbon emissions and ultimately costs.
The varied demands that an organisation places on its complex data centre infrastructures must be viewed as a central part of an organisation’s risk management and broader business strategy. Technology is advancing at a fast rate and with data centres multiplying rapidly, having effective power and cooling techniques can make all the difference in cutting carbon and running your data centre more efficiently going forward.
The demand for operational efficiency within data centres is increasing and data centre managers need to implement an effective power strategy to meet compliance demands and ensure a ‘green’ approach. As organisations increasingly require large-scale power supplies, Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS) have been at the centre of ensuring better power quality and security and today fulfill a critical role in managing power efficiency. However, on365 has seen a number of issues in this area as many organisations maintain old UPS and backup generator systems that are often exposed to loads that they were not designed to power or do not sustain the requirements of a modern data centre. These older systems will often operate at only 80 per cent efficiency, effectively wasting 20 per cent of energy by 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 for cooling, and puts increasing pressure on the computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units.
For the data centre manager this problem can be overcome by investing in a more up to date UPS. If current systems are old and inefficient, they will be costing your organisation more money than they should and increasing your carbon emissions. When considering a new UPS, it is crucial to factor in the type and configuration of the system that suits your application. UPS comes in different forms whether being a centralised or decentralised, modular or traditional parallel system. Apart from taking up less physical space in the data centre, investing in a new UPS could mean optimising the energy usage to 96 per cent efficiency and reducing the loss to 4 per cent - a major reduction that will impact the organisation’s overall power consumption and required cooling support.
Keeping a data centre running 24/7 is critical to business continuity, yet IT managers have to face constant pressure to deliver availability and scalability whilst battling power and cooling complexities with often very few resources. For example, the energy that goes into a piece of electronic equipment is converted into heat, so maintaining low temperatures and cooling in server rooms must be managed correctly. Humidity levels are also vital, as too much humidity causes condensation on the internal components; too little causes static amongst sensitive electrical parts. Added to this, cooling methods require additional power.
Cooling a data centre accounts for around 60 per cent of a server room’s power usage and is an area where significant energy reductions can be made. By using best practice cooling techniques coupled with the latest technologies, energy consumption can be halved. More data centre owners are looking to change their approach to cooling by reviewing at more natural cooling strategies. These include micro power generation, solar cooling and evaporative cooling. A number of data centres, particularly in the United States, have used locally produced hydroelectric power which involves natural air cooling. This eliminates the need for electricity to cool a server room, a factor which is often more energy intensive than the IT equipment itself.
In a similar move, Iceland has been marketing itself as an ideal location to build data centres with access to unlimited cheap energy, based on geothermal power. Additionally, the year-long low external temperatures make it feasible to air-cool a data centre and also have zero incremental carbon impact on the environment. Although this offers opportunities, locating a data centre near volcanoes also offer disruption – particularly due to the recent volcanic eruptions! Solar and wind power strategies have also been considered to help cool a data centre. Although not yet used to completely power organisations on their own, they can be used to support some of the more peripheral aspects of the data centre. These strategies in the UK data centre industry are few and far between, and are not being deployed to their full advantage.
The conventional legacy approach to data centre cooling using room-orientated architecture has technical and practical limitations in next generation data centres. The need for data centres to adapt to changing requirements, reliably support high and variable power density and reduce electrical power consumption and other operating costs, has directly led to the development of row and rack-orientated cooling architectures. These two setups are more successful at addressing these needs, particularly at operating densities of 3 kW per rack or greater.
Energy efficiency, green IT and monitoring of data centre consumption has to be on every data centre manager’s agenda. Power and cooling strategies need to be reviewed on a regular basis as well as hardware updates. Old systems chew through energy and end up costing an organisation more than necessary, plus are wasteful of resources. In the wake of increasing compliance and environmental pressure, data centre managers need to come together and opt for more efficient, less energy-wasteful strategies. Alongside this, exploring the ideas of geothermal power and cooling will benefit the green agenda hugely and help to keep on track with environmental goals, as well as offer substantial cost savings.
