Introduction and green technology
The need to go green has never been more important. With climate change firmly on the agenda, having an energy efficient data centre will help in saving carbon and money in the long-term.
Many estimates put the number of data centres in the UK at over 200. The cloud means that many more are being built. This in turn means the amount of energy used to power and cool servers running in these facilities is going up.
Water consumption is also on a par with that of wine producers and the carbon footprint of these vast data warehouses is second only to the airlines. This gives you some idea of how important it is that environmental considerations are taken into account.
Three green factors
There are three things that can intrinsically make a data centre greener: infrastructure, the hardware and geography, according to Jack Bedell-Pearce, Managing Director at 4D.
He notes: "Significant gains can be made in upgrading a data centre's infrastructure – this can include changing a legacy HVAC system into an evaporative cooling system or installing more efficient UPSs and generators."
He adds that in the past five years we've witnessed some giant leaps in green infrastructure technology (especially in cooling), but he says it is now difficult to see how similar large gains can be made on this front in the foreseeable future.
Bedell-Pearce reckons that there is still potential to upgrade and virtualise hardware. "Using more energy efficient hardware and replacing dedicated servers (some of which were running below 20% capacity) with virtual systems (which can be optimised to run at 80%+ capacity), can significantly give you more processing bang for your buck," he says.
He adds that geography is the ultimate 'green upgrade'. "Often data centres have to be located in geographical proximity to the end users (hence the large cluster of data centres in Central London, despite the high cost of land) whereas non-critical or non-latency dependent systems can be located further afield," he notes.
Geographically optimal green locations include Iceland (cold ambient air for cooling and carbon neutral energy from geothermal power stations) and the coast of Finland (Hamina), where Google has built a facility that uses seawater for its water cooling system and locally generated wind power.
Optimising efficiency
There are many aspects of data centre design and operation where more efficiencies can be found, according to David Manning, director of data centre consultancy and operations, MigSolv. "The simplest of these is lighting. Just by making lighting PIR-controlled would save as much as 5% of overall power consumption. And why on earth do operators light up unmanned data centres 24 hours a day? Computers aren't afraid of the dark!"
Housekeeping is another factor. So many data centres have cardboard and other packaging waste lying around, says Manning. Packaging creates dust, which is both a fire hazard and blocks fans, causing them to consume more power as they work harder. "This creates more heat, which makes the air con work harder, which uses yet more power and produces more CO2. I know it sounds simple, but if you remove all cardboard and packaging, you'll immediately boost a data centre's green credentials."
Retrofitting and power considerations
Rip it up and start again
Does going green mean tearing down an inefficient data centre and building a more efficient one? "Green features can certainly be retrofitted to old data centres, if you take a careful approach," says Manning.
He points to his firm's Gatehouse data centre in Norwich. This 20-year-old data centre was stripped back to bare walls and had the interior completely redesigned, replacing the M&E infrastructure with new, leading edge, environmentally efficient equipment.
"Amongst other initiatives, we installed LED lighting throughout – saving 90% on lighting energy. A free cooling plant provides over 300 days of cooling per year to the IT equipment without having to run chillers," he says.
Cool for cats
Cooling is another cause of energy consumption for data centres. Years ago, many data centres weren't even practicing hot/cold aisles (where you orientate two rows of racks in a row facing the cold air grilles) as electricity was still relatively cheap and the solution to cooling a data floor was massively over-specifying the cooling capacity.
Bedell-Pearce says that evaporative cooling has been something of a revelation. "While initially sceptical, we trialled it in our UPS room and as it was such a huge success, we rolled it out in our main data floor. By 2012 we were one of the first data centres in the UK to be running an evaporative cooling system which brought our PUE below 1.14 – one of the lowest not only in the UK, but the world."
Fight the power
One way to cut down on power requirements could be by using artificial intelligence. Manning says that data centres using AI for management will be able to automatically balance cooling against load, alert personnel if a piece of equipment needs maintenance, report on its own efficiency and configure itself without the need for manual intervention.
"AI developments will eventually replace traditional DCIM tools by doing everything existing tools do but doing it better and without needing people to intervene. I believe this will be one of the major areas of innovation in data centre environmental management over the next two to three years," he says.
Pulsant's group CTO, Matt Lovell, says in the next 12 to 18 months there will be a greater emphasis on how we enhance performance and effectiveness as measured by lower carbon consumption through the optimisation of existing, implemented systems.
"We will observe much greater focus on incremental optimisation from existing systems and how we can fine-tune existing environments through the use of emerging dynamic imaging, systems control, data capture and monitoring tools to automate condition responses and maximise utilisation of compute, storage, memory and network resources," he says.
"The data centre operator will play a more extrinsic role within this strategy as they regulate the environmental conditions which further reduces the carbon footprints of associated mechanical and electrical systems."
It is clear that as data centres are major power users, they will be in the spotlight as far as environmental concerns go. Putting green measures in place now could help data centres avoid the wrath of the green lobby.
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