FACILITIES design
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http://www.dcsuk.info/n/capb
If you can’t stand the heat… University of East Anglia delivers data centre to match corporate green credentials.
THE UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA (UEA) is one of the leading green technology institutions in the UK. Students and staff are encouraged to think about what they do and its environmental impact. As part of this, the UEA runs its own Green Impact Awards every year to encourage innovation in the field of environmental impact within the university and beyond. It should come as no surprise then, that when UEA looked at its existing data centre, it realised that there was much to be done in order to bring it in line with corporate goals. To ensure that they got the best value for greening their data centre refurbishment, UEA approach Salix, specialists in energy efficiency loans.
The result was a partnership between UEA, Salix, Future-Tech and DataRacks to deliver energy efficiency, full pay-back within six years and a facility that meets very stringent targets.
Existing facility As James Willman, Head of Pre-Sales Consultancy with Future-Tech explained, “One of the major challenges for this project was the existing facility. The UEA data centre is located in a Grade II listed building. This meant that any solution that relied on making holes in walls, moving walls or changing the construction of floor and ceilings was not acceptable. Instead, the solution had to work within the existing space in order to deliver improvements”.
Another restriction was time. As with any university, UEA has research programmes that operate all year round which meant that any large works would have to be planned and executed when the majority of the student body was on leave.
Like most projects, the trouble came in threes. The third was that the data centre is located very close to student accommodation and teaching facilities. This meant that any solution would have to be not just energy efficient but would also have to meet extremely tight noise emission standards as well.
Data centre requirements As a major research hub, UEA runs a lot of computer equipment. While it is not running a mega data centre, it is representative
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www.dcsuk.info I May 2014
of a lot of mid-sized company facilities. The existing data centre consumed around 60kW with a fairly typical PUE of 2.08. The existing cooling system was capable of supporting a load of 138kW in an N+1 configuration. Looking to the future, UEA wants to increase the capacity of the data centre in order to take on new research projects and support staff and students.
This means that the cooling load will need to increase by over 60% to 220kW. At the same time, the efficiency of the cooling has to support a dramatic lowering of the PUE to as low as 1.19 when the data centre is fully loaded.
For most corporate data centre new-builds, where a PUE of around 1.4 is more common, a 1.19 PUE would be seen as an extremely optimistic target! What is important here is that the funding for this project was tied to the ability of the Future-Tech and its subcontractors to achieve such a low PUE. This is an approach that enterprise customers should seriously consider.
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