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PIMP My Data Centre Well, its that time of year again, here at BroadGroup we are assembling the programme for the annual Power and Cooling for Data Centres conference to be held in London October 4-5, and this year the challenge is not whether we can fill 2 days with useful insightful presentations, but how to address all of the issues in just 2 days. The Problems Eight years ago at the time when data centres as we know them today were first being rolled out throughout Europe and the US, power was even then an issue. It was an issue simply because the utility companies had no idea how to deal with such large demands for power from what amounted to a single building and many companies especially in tier 1 cities struggled to get hooked up. In 2007, the Data Centre industry has far more serious power and cooling problems to contend with, problems that appear to have no hope of immediate resolution. Finding workable solutions is going to be a mammoth task. Lets face it, technology usage is still spiralling upwards (with no cut off point in sight), new applications demand more and more power, storage requirements in the wake of MiFID, Sarbanes-Oxley et al are putting an ever increasing strain on corporate Data Centres, but at the same time the Data Centre industry must somehow reduce its overall power consumption (and thereby stop its huge contribution to the destruction of the planet…………). If all that isn’t enough, then consider the fact that that in 2008, it is suggested that 50% of today’s Data Centres will not have sufficient Power and Cooling capacity to meet the demands of high density equipment. Obviously something has to be done. Ok, solution number one – lets all turn off our computers, throw away our mobile phones / PDAs (responsibly of course) and revert back to good old pen and paper and start to write each other letters again. Of course this isn’t going to happen so what is? It is not going to be an easy task balancing out the needs of an increasingly technology hungry society (with the data centre at the root of the enabling infrastructure for such technology) against social and corporate responsibility to reduce carbon footprints / reduce emissions / save the planet. Build Better Data Centres Data Centres built several years ago were not built with today’s problems in mind, so one obvious solution is to build better data centres. Part of the challenge is that many data centres are now legacy and were built and designed with overambitious power consumption levels in order to allow for future needs. This has in turn led to a situation where almost all Data Centres are wasting tremendous amounts of power. In addition to this, traditional cooling solutions were not intended to deal with the amount of power required today and recent outages (including the myspace.com power outage) are as likely to be down to cooling failures rather than traditional power failure. Vendors are increasingly moving towards providing efficient equipment and finding ways to improve the efficiency of the data centre itself. Data Centre operators should begin to look more closely at alternatives to the traditional methods of cooling (for instance in-rack cooling advocated by APC or fresh air cooling as BT suggests) and of course alternatives to the traditional methods of powering the facility. By simply reorganising the way in which the facility is put together, efficiency can be increased by a significant amount. One way forward is for data centres to work towards increasing the amount of power being used for the actual IT loads. Today more than 50% of the power supplying a typical DC goes to the Power and Cooling systems and not to the IT loads so there is obviously room for improvement. This however may not be as easy as it sounds. Alex Rabbetts of Migration Solutions points out that in many cases companies offering project management and build of data centres have very little expertise in the area and will proceed on a lowest cost option rather than with energy targets or ‘greening’ in mind. Others such as FutureTech agree that this is a problem. Aaron Davies, CMO at APC MGE suggests that education can help to improve the way data centres are built and with this end in mind APC run a ‘university’ offering training to anyone involved in real estate. Pimp My Existing Data Centre So any new data centre build should be built with efficiency in mind, but what of existing data centres? With build almost impossible now in cities such as London, existing facilities are operating at capacity and most are top of the list for power wastage. With increasing amounts of budgets being spent on power the budget remaining for infrastructure improvements is rapidly decreasing. However, costs incurred for improving efficiency in the Data Centre will be money well spent in the long term, and all data centres whether corporate or commercial should consider following the example of BT. No, your eyesight isn’t failing I did write BT. The company long considered to be the dinosaur of the telecom industry is leading the way in improving the efficiency of its data centres. With the help of a company called DCMI, BT has managed to improve the efficiency in its data centres by 60% - a whopping amount. This has been achieved by a process of auditing each individual facility and reorganising accordingly. What’s more, they have not done this in order to orchestrate a marketing campaign it has been done quietly with little fanfare. There is now no excuse, if BT can do it then so can you. Industry Wide Standards are the way forward….. Vendors, Providers, Governments and User Groups have all, over the past 12 months begun to formalise their strategies for dealing with the data centre power usage. At a recent APC MGE press convention, Neil Rasmussen CTO at APC underlined the necessity for an industry wide set of standards for energy efficiency in the data centre and heralded this as the way forward rather than government imposed targets. Neil is adamant that “….the smartest thing (for a Data Centre) to do is to get on a track for improvement, rather than set arbitrary goals.” With APC MGE having the tools available to audit individual Data Centres in terms of their energy efficiency (with the view to then improving underperforming facilities) maybe it is time for all data centres to stand up and be counted. If as an industry we can all take responsibility for turning our facilities green, then there will be no need for government imposed targets. Power and Cooling for Data Centres 2007 All of the companies mentioned above will be taking part in Power and Cooling for Data Centres 2007 conference and Expo. Visit www.datacentres.com/pac/ for further details. * Thanks to Aaron Davis of APC MGE for the title
of this piece!
Have you also seen our other consultant articles? Too Much
Greenwash?
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