place in the old communications room from the inventory of inefficient data centres and moves them to a professional data centre. The professional data centre
will certainly be highly focused on environmental efficiency and impact and monitoring its PUE and carbon footprint. So the migration reduces the carbon footprint of IT and communications activities as a whole. Cloud computing has a more
far-reaching impact on green data centre issues. Moving an organisation’s IT and communications operations from an environmentally inefficient in-house communications room to an environmentally efficient professional data centre is likely to considerably reduce its carbon footprint and environmental impact. But a server in an in-house operation
is typically running at 10-20 per cent utilisation - and is sized to cope with peaks that may never occur and even has a significant contingency margin above those peak levels. Mostly, the organisation’s applications and communications will run on standard servers under standard operating systems using standard interfaces. That means they can be virtualised. In other words, they run on virtual
machines, which allow for immediate expansion of capacity to meet those peaks if and when they occur, but without the continuous overhead of a dedicated server. The net result is that a move of an
organisation’s critical operations from in-house operations to virtualised operations by a managed services provider in a professional data centre can reduce the environmental impact and carbon footprint of those operations by an order of magnitude. Even within a professional data
centre, the process of steadily increasing environmental efficiency goes on, as new equipment comes onto the market with better performance and as new ideas gain ground. Even the most state-of-the-art data
centre will only stay that way for a moment in time. Once that moment has passed, it needs upgrading to the latest standards and thinking.
www.netcommseurope.com
Cooling systems Cooling systems are a good example. Ten years ago, almost all data centre cooling systems were direct expansion (DX) systems and the suppliers of such systems designed for the minimum capital cost because the buyers bought the cheapest unit that would do the job. Electricity consumption and
energy efficiency were a secondary consideration and the decision-making was about financial comparisons and benefits. Carbon footprints were something bears made when walking across charcoal. Today, energy efficiency is the
primary selling point for DX chiller manufacturers. No data centre designer installs a chiller system without knowing its COP (Coefficient Of Performance – the ratio of energy moved to energy used to move it). The UK government offers tax relief
for purchases of equipment with a COP rating better than a pre-set threshold - currently around 3.0 depending on configuration. A state of the art data centre built ten years ago is now far behind. Any sensible data centre operator will be continuously reviewing and replacing equipment to keep up. At the same time, new ideas have
arrived, even in something as basic as cooling systems. Free-air cooling systems have developed, and so brought a whole new technology for data centre cooling. Evaporative cooling has moved
from something obscure for cooling factories on the cheap to a mainstream technology for data centres. Indirect evaporative cooling has been developed as a counter to the problems of allowing potentially contaminated outside air into the data centre. This is not an industry that stands
still, and it moves much faster than most when developing environmental mitigation strategies. Environmental considerations are
not just energy efficiencies. Most data centres use diesel generators for back-up power.
Whilst the diesel generators may not
be running for a high percentage of the time, when they do run, they can be a significant source of pollution, both to the atmosphere and in creating noise pollution for neighbouring properties.
www.city-lifeline.co.uk Poor wiring - energy inefficiency
This is especially the situation in urban areas, where the inability to dissipate pollution quickly can be a problem. Older diesel generators, in particular, generate huge clouds of black smoke on start-up. And whilst this issue may not be
a problem in an out of town data centre, it is in an urban area, and is not environmentally responsible in either case. Modern diesels have to meet very stringent pollution requirements. Biodiesel can be used, reducing the
carbon footprint of diesel engines, but it needs more care and more frequent cleaning. Again, a data centre operator needs to keep updating to stay in line with his environmental responsibilities. The green data centre is here to
stay. Rising public awareness of green issues and the drive for environmental responsibility mean that greenness is no longer a selling point which differentiates one data centre from another, but is an essential fact of life for everyone involved with data centres, whether they are professional colocation operations or in-house communications rooms. Being green requires significant on-
going investments, but the benefits are not just to the data centre operator but to the global community as well.
NETCOMMS europe Volume IV Issue 3 2014 11
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44