WHAT’S HOT the analyst
a number of data centres are also investigating the potential of on-site energy generation. For example, EBay wanted to take control of energy costs while reducing its carbon footprint, leading to a novel design. Its data centre is
powered by biogas-fed fuel-cell modules, uses no UPS (uninterruptible power supply) units on IT loads and does not use any chillers
Context
The term ‘smart city’ can be broadly defined as an attempt to integrate intelligent urban transportation, energy and communication networks. Some forecasters think the market for the variety of technologies that fall under the smart-city umbrella could be hundreds of billions or even a trillion dollars by 2020. IBM, one of the main proponents of the technology, believes the market will be worth $30-40bn in the next several years – a conservative estimate that allows for some repurposing and extrapolation of existing projects.
The EU is also a believer in the smart-city concept and estimates that approximately 60% of Europeans live in cities, and urban areas are responsible for 70% of energy consumption in the region. It is backing smart-cities research as a key priority in its main R&D initiative and funding a coordinated group of smart-city research projects including six collaborative projects that will investigate the integration between smart cities and a major user of energy – data centres.
The EU is also keen to strengthen links between projects, and promote information exchange with industry, as well as the commercialization of project results where possible.
Impediments Part of the remit of the projects will be to understand some of the impediments to
colocating data centres close to cities and sources of renewable energy. For example, certain types of data centres have to be close to the businesses they serve – for example, financial services – due to constraints around latency (the speed at which data can travel). These urban data centres could be integrated with smart-city technologies relatively easily. We are aware of a UK-based financial services data centre operator that is selling excess energy from standby generators back to the grid, for example. However, there may be concerns about any potential impact on uptime/availability, as well as security implications.
An increasing number of facilities – most notably those owned by cloud data centre operators such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft – are also located close to sources of renewable (or just cheap) energy. However, these renewable energy sources are often in remote locations such as solar arrays, located in desert areas and offshore wind farms.
Very few data centres would currently meet the EU’s criteria of being located in a city and close to a source of renewable energy. However, different mechanisms exist for purchasing renewable energy, and it may be within the scope of the projects to investigate the implications of all these approaches.
Technology
A variety of technologies and techniques can be defined as contributing to the development of smart cities. Those most relevant to the data centre industry include: £ Energy saving and demand response, linking energy availability with traffic, temperature and transport.
£ Reuse of heating and cooling between buildings according to demand.
£ Reporting on city-wide energy, carbon and water usage employing real-time and non- real-time data.
£ Feeding information on water and power availability and usage back to individuals, including their own usage based on smart meters.
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www.dcseurope.info I November 2013
The EU projects in question will specifically investigate the energy-efficiency benefits (if any) of locating data centres in, or adjacent to, smart cities. For example, research areas include diverting waste heat from data centres into city heating systems. There are already a number of examples of this technique in use such as IT services company, Tieto, which built a system to allow waste heat from its data centre in Espoo, Finland, to be redirected to local housing. The EU is also keen for projects to investigate how smart cities and data centres can be optimised to make better use of renewable energy. For example, using workload scheduling and management, an application can be scheduled to coincide with a peak period of renewable production.
This kind of application/workload focus ties in with a number of emerging trends in the data centre industry, including the concept of software-defined data centres, and advanced data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) tools.
A number of data centres are also investigating the potential of on-site energy generation. For example, EBay wanted to take control of energy costs while reducing its carbon footprint, leading to a novel design. Its data centre is powered by biogas-fed fuel-cell modules, uses no UPS (uninterruptible power supply) units on IT loads and does not use any chillers.
Furthermore, a US research project backed by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Clarkson University, Advanced Micro Devices, HP and GE Global Research is investigating how to develop networks of small-distributed facilities (container-based data centres are one example) that can be located close to distributed sources of renewables.
Projects
The data centre-specific smart city projects are made up of consortia including IT suppliers, energy research organisations and universities (451 is also a member of one of
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