no equipment is present. These can stop air escaping by preventing it from falling between or back behind the racks.
Check flooring - flooring is as important to consider for potential air leakage as your walls. Check for gaps allowing air to escape - behind and beneath air-cooling units or through air vents in floor tiles. The goal is to direct the cold air in one direction, through the racks and out the other side. Perforated tiles should be placed in the planned cold aisle in front of racks in order to do so.
Introduce aisle containment - containment can be introduced once airflow leaks and gaps have been addressed. Introducing roofs and doors to the end of aisles can deliver major improvements. Solid doors or Perspex dividers are effective, even butchers’ curtains can make a big difference, if not a very attractive option.
Control air temperature - the average data centre runs at 21 degrees, but with extended ASHRAE standard, server manufacturers are happy with DC temperatures from 18-27 degrees supply air. Steps such as turning off cooling units or increasing the temperature of water to those units can lead to further savings.
Regulate humidity - by operating to a slightly wider banding; between 20 and 80 per cent, air is able to drift a little more and vapour production can be decreased – significantly reducing energy consumption.
Check transformer voltage - a high unnecessary voltage equals a higher, unnecessary use of power, resulting in additional cost. Reducing voltage can also reduce loss in transformers.
Remove isolation transformers - isolation transformers were once a legal requirement, however they are often no longer required and are an unnecessary drain on your power.
Turn off ‘zombie’ equipment - in an enterprise environment there is a
www.netcommseurope.com
Colt’s data centre - getting ready
good chance you’re running redundant equipment. Turning it off could be a simple step to significant energy savings.
Measure again - at the end of a 12-month period there should be enough data to benchmark against. This will allow you to assess whether your measurements are going in the right direction. Be cautious however of the seasonality and changes in outside temperate can have on a significant impact on power usage and anticipated energy savings.
Increasing efficiency The costs and implications of not prioritising increased efficiency, especially in data centres more than seven years old are not worth the risks. There are vast financial implications for the business, communications, client management and accounts if a data centre does not reduce its energy use, which is why it’s essential to ensure the correct processes are followed, thus allowing the life of a data centre to increase whilst the cost of running it substantially decreases. With a vast data centre estate across Europe we were well aware of the
benefits of reducing power consumption but a couple of years ago we decided to regulate our approach to improving efficiency. We worked out a standard set of
guidelines for our operations crew to systematically ensure that from simple to more complex solutions, we were maximising efficiency in every data centre we have. For the past three years our efficiency improvement programme has been underway, and we have achieved an 18 per cent reduction in energy use, with 10 per cent in year one alone.
Implementing some of these quick
fix measure has saved us €4 million annually to date. The increase in automation has helped to drive cost- savings and meet speed requirements. The speed of newer technologies also means that information is readily available, enabling data centre managers to gain insight and to tweak configurations in real-time. Taking advantage of some of the
measures above can have both short and long-term improvements on the efficiency of your data centre estates.
www.colt.net NETCOMMS europe Volume IV Issue 3 2014 23
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