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CASE STUDY: UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS’ SUSTAINABILITY TEAM
The battle to win hearts and minds for the green agenda is best done face to face,
at Leeds, says. For the past three years the University has run energy reduction campaigns including asking staff and students to make a green pledge. Members of the team have been out and about with iPads logging staff and student promises to help make them accountable. The team have also supported people
to work in a more sustainable way. To save energy in the University’s laboratories, for example, they have asked scientists to increase the temperature on ultra-cold freezers and use the timers on their ovens. James says: “It’s about adapting to the different cultures around the University.” Reducing environmental impact often
begins with increasing awareness of just how much energy you’re using. Following
unit of computing’ (NUC) and the so- called thin-client technology that’s used by many universities including Queen Margaret University in Scotland. These are smaller, more discreet and effi cient devices that work like PCs but on 72% less power. But when it comes to major savings
from a carbon and cost reduction viewpoint, most are now looking to the next generation of data centres. Cooling IT servers is a major headache for those who manage them. As universities seek to move servers out of their offi ces and into specially designed data centres, the challenge emerges of how to effi ciently cool them as well as how to fi nance this major cost. Unless you can aff ord your own small nuclear plant at ached to a university, you’ll have to buy power in. Rob Bristow says: “If you’ve got the
opportunity to build a new data centre, you can do really amazing things. But it’s more challenging where you’re refurbishing or re-engineering existing space in areas which were never designed for the job – you need a good engineering partner.”
The future? Now that green technology has stopped competing with cost, and has started to support it, the technology itself needs to catch up to ensure that high performance computing can continue to support the UK’s
in the footsteps of universities like Manchester, students and staff at the University of Leeds will soon be able to view data on screens about their energy use as they move around the campus. Another tactic is devolved budgeting, whereby individual departments pay their own energy costs, and receive rewards depending on whether they meet given targets.
research long into the future. Cooling using air or liquid are options
for data centres that aren’t situated in chilly climates. At the University of Leeds, researchers are working with commercial fi rm Iceotope on data servers cooled by liquid. This liquid totally replaces the air conditioning that cools most computers. It’s an almost silent process that could go on in the corner of your offi ce and because it works by heat exchange, it can save up to 98% on overheads compared with air- cooled systems. At the University of Bath’s data centre
the liquid cooling solution provided by Future-Tech is making use of ‘free’ cooling for more than three quarters of the year. This works as long as the temperature outside is lower than 22 degrees Celsius. These universities have invested
BELOW: Andy Bennett (left) and Rob Bristow (right)
in bespoke solutions. But we are also likely to see more universities outsourcing their data centres to the cloud as capacity grows and the need for fl exibility increases. What’s clear is that the need for green and the need for digital are no longer pulling in diff erent directions. By winning hearts and minds over to the green agenda, and fi nding new ways to keep their equipment
cool, universities are creating healthier bank balances and carbon footprints. ET
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