Thursday 20 December 2012

Iceotope beats global competition to win the Tech Trailblazers Sustainability Award


18th December 2012 – Iceotope is proud to announce its success in the first ever Tech Trailblazers Awards, an accolade which boasts some of the world’s most innovative new tech start-ups. In winning the Sustainable IT Trailblazer category, the Sheffield-based business fought off stiff competition from all over the globe. Its category alone saw entrants from South Africa, Iceland and the USA, all vying for the prize. The award tops off a stellar year for the fledgling business and follows a string of industry award wins in 2012, including successes in the Elektra, Techworld and RealBusiness Future 50 Awards.

As well as a public vote, the winning companies were chosen by an independent judging panel in a process that saw each member invest millions of ‘virtual dollars’ into their chosen businesses. The awards covered nine distinct categories and separate IT sectors including mobile, virtualisation and security.

The award was given to Iceotope in recognition of its capability to address some of the most pressing environmental issues in IT, including the sharp rise of energy usage and related CO2 emissions as a result of industry growth, as well as the spiralling costs of running a data centre. Launched earlier this year, Iceotope’s innovative liquid cooling system can provide full-time free cooling for IT anywhere on the planet and also bears the ‘Made in Sheffield’ mark, an accolade given to organisations continuing the region's tradition of manufacturing the highest quality goods and products.

“We are absolutely delighted to be recognised in this manner – it caps off a brilliant 2012 but also reflects the great work our research and development teams have been doing for some time”, said Iceotope CEO, Neil Bennett. “We’d like to thank the fantastic institutions like 3M™, AMD, Intel and the University of Leeds that have backed us throughout, the brilliant support we achieved during the public vote, as well as the awards organisers and sponsors who put this all together. Seeing Iceotope listed amongst some of the most ground-breaking and successful new start-ups, from every corner of the globe, is absolutely brilliant and emphasises just how far we believe we can reach in the future - as well as how far we’ve already come

Monday 26 November 2012

DatacenterDynamics EMEA Awards 2012 Finalists

The most prestigious accolades in the data center industry will be presented at the 6th Annual DatacenterDynamics EMEA Awards on December 13th at the Lancaster London Hotel. 

Special non-shortlisted awards for Outstanding Contribution to the Industry and Business Leader of the Year will also be presented at the ceremony.

 George Rockett, chief strategy officer at DatacenterDynamics, said: The DatacenterDynamics EMEA Awards form part of the Global Awards Programme which recognises innovation and leadership across the data center industry. The judging process, conducted by industry experts from across the sector, will continue between now and the Gala ceremony on December 13th which will see this years people and projects join previous winners as the recognised leaders in the data center industry. Built up over the last six years the DatacenterDynamics Awards are the most sought after in the industry. The Global Awards Programme consists of separate awards which celebrate the people, companies and developments in markets including North America, LATAM, Brazil, China and South East Asia.




Asetek, Inc. for RackCDU Liquid Cooling System For Data Center Efficiency

Iceotope for The Iceotope Liquid Cooling Solution

Munters Ltd for DigiPlex A2A Indirect Evaporative Cooling Modular Data Centre Solution University of Troms for Design And Implementation Of A Data Center Based On Hot Water Cooling Cable & Wireless Worldwide C&W Worldwide - Urban Blueprint

Digital Realty for Optimised Chilled-Water Cooling Solution At Digital Chessington

Lloyds Banking Group for Horizon Datacentre Programme

Mafi Mushkila Limited for Rack Mounted Server Emulator Development

Cannon Technologies for Cannon T4 Modular Data Centre

Euclyde Data Centers for Neoclyde Data Centre

Mercedes-Benz for Mercedes-Benz UK Primary Data Centre

NHS Airedale, Bradford and Leeds for NHS Bradford, Airedale & Leeds High Density Data Centre

ARM Ltd for New High Performance Computing (HPC) Data Centre

Colt Technology Services for Colt - A New Generation Of Data Centres

GSI for GSI MiniCube Data Center Powered By eCube

Sudlows for The BelleVue Data Centre - Sudlows


Ark Continuity for Ark Continuity's Spring Park Data Centre

HP for HP Suttons, Reading BCRS Facility Phase II.

MEEZA for M-VAULT 3

SBERBANK of Russia for Sberbank Mega Datacenter

Kent County Council for Kent Connects Regional Data Centres

MITA for MITA-01 Corporate Data Centre - Government Of Malta

Nottinghamshire County Council for Nottinghamshire County Council Data Centre

Trinity College Dublin for Trinity College Green Data Centre

De Novo for De Novo DC

Interoute for Interoute Virtual Data Centre

Linxdatacenter for Cloud Linxdatacenter Facility In Warsaw

Vtesse for Arup Move To Vtesse Cirrus

Equinix for Equinix Renewable Heating Project

Hetzner Online AG for Hetzner Online Data Center Parks

TelecityGroup for TelecityGroups AMS5 Data Centre Verne Global for Verne Globals Dual-Sourced,
Renewable Powered Datacentre


Green Datacenter AG for greenDatacenter Zurich West

Interxion for Seawater Cooling Project

LAMDA Hellix Data Centers SA for LAMDA Hellix Mission Critical Facility


TIZZON B.V. for PCM Control

Interoute for Interoute Virtual Data Centre Cloud Migration

Logica (now part of CGI) for Logica - Data Centre Consolidation Programme

Sleek Networks Ltd for Sleek Cloud Alignment


University of St Andrews for ICT Transformation At The University Of St Andrews

Asteros for The Oil Company "Bashneft" Corporate Data Center

Cannon Technologies for Cannon T4 Modular Data Centre

FORTRUST for FORTRUST IO Modular Data Centers

Minkels for Swiss Cold War Bunker Project

Arup: Chris Tolmie

IBM France: Emmanuel Tong-Viet

Red Engineering Design Ltd: Alex Nock

Romonet: Ehsaan Farsimadan

Colt Technology Services: Colt/Verne Global Delivery Team

Lloyds Banking Group: Horizon Prorgramme Team


MITA: MITA-01 Data Centre Migration Project - MALTA

UKFast: Migration Team

The DatacenterDynamics EMEA Awards headline sponsor is infinity. DatacenterDynamics is grateful to infinity and to all the category sponsors for their continued support.

A limited number of tickets remain. To attend the event or for more information about the awards contact
paul.mangles@datacenterdynamics.com

http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/focus/archive/2012/11/datacenterdynamics-emea-awards-2012-




Wednesday 21 November 2012

Tech Trailblazers Awards Finalists Announced




Which startups have the most promising technologies? Vote for your favorites now.
The first-annual Tech Trailblazers Awards for enterprise information technology startups today announced
shortlisted finalists across the nine categories: Big Data, Cloud, Emerging Markets, Infosecurity, Mobile, Networking, Storage, Sustainable IT and Virtualization.
The first outing of the awards received a considerable groundswell of high quality entrants making the judging
quite a challenge.
The winners of the Tech Trailblazers Awards 2012 will be determined by the voting public and the judging panel. Which startups have the most promising technologies? Discover the finalists and vote for your favorites now from the Tech Trailblazers website just click on the Vote Now tab.

Finalists in the Tech Trailblazers Awards 2012

Big Data
-DataSift (@DataSift), www.datasift.com
-GoodData (@GoodData), www.gooddata.com
-GridStore (@GridStore), www.gridstore.com
-MapR (@MapR), www.mapr.com
-Verdigris Tech (@Verdigristech), www.verdigristech.com

Cloud
-Backupify (@Backupify), www.backupify.com
-CloudLock (@CloudLock), www.cloudlock.com
-SaaSID (@SaaSID), www.saasid.com
-Tiatros (@Tiatros), www.tiatros.com
-Virtustream (@Virtustream), www.virtustream.com
-Zadara Storage (@ZadaraStorage), www.zadarastorage.com

Emerging Markets
-ABCD Experts (@ABCDexperts), www.abcdexperts.com

-Chalet Tech (@ChaletTech), www.chalettech.com
-CloudByte (@CloudByteInc), www.cloudbyte.com
-SustainableIT (Twitter: @sustainableIT), www.sustainableit.co.za
-Infotectsecurity, www.infotectsecurity.com

Mobile
-Genwi (@Genwi), www.genwi.com
-GoCanvas (@GoCanvas), www.gocanvas.com
-ImageVisionLabs (@ImageVisionLabs), www.imagevision.com/
-Mezeo (@Mezeo), www.mezeo.com
-Moasis (@MoasisGlobal), www.moasisglobal.com

Networking
-Aryaka (@AryakaNetworks), www.aryaka.com
-Embrane (@Embrane), www.embrane.com
-Infineta (@Infineta), www.infineta.com

Security
-Chalet Tech (@ChaletTech), www.chalettech.com
-CipherCloud (@CipherCloud), www.ciphercloud.com
-Dome9 (@Dome9), www.dome9.com
-SaaSID (@SaaSID), www.saasid.com
-Vaultive (@Vaultive), www.vaultive.com
-Ventisys (@Ventisys), www.ventisys.com

Storage
-Actifio (@Actifio), www.actifio.com

-CTERA (@CTERA), www.ctera.com
-SMART Storage Systems (@SMARTSSD), www.smartstoragesys.com
-SolidFire (@SolidFire), www.solidfire.com
-Virtual Instruments (@Virtual_Inst), www.virtualinstruments.com

Sustainable IT
-Building Sustainability (@BSLEnergyTeam), www.buildingsustainability.net
-GreenQloud (@GreenQloud), www.greenqloud.com
-Iceotope (@Iceotope), www.iceotope.com
-Nutanix (@Nutanix), www.nutanix.com
-SustainableIT (@SustainableIT), www.sustainableit.co.za

Virtualization
-GreenBytes (@GetGreenBytes), www.getgreenbytes.com
-Nutanix (@Nutanix), www.nutanix.com
-Virtual Instruments (@Virtual_Inst), www.virtualinstruments.com
-VMTurbo (@VMTurbo), www.vmturbo.com
-Zerto (@ZertoCorp), www.zerto.com

Rose Ross, founder of the Tech Trailblazers Awards, commented, “The Tech Trailblazers Awards were designed to put a spotlight on the best-of-the-best of new technology startups from around the world. Our shortlists highlight some of the hidden gems of the global enterprise information technology industry, from Icelandto Israel, from Singapore to the Silicon Valley.” Ross added, “Our global community of judges had some hard work to do in selecting the shortlists from an impressive pool of contenders, but they did a great job. The 41 finalists in the Tech Trailblazers Awards represent some rising stars in the technology world-pioneers who are helping invent the systems that make business faster, more efficient, more secure, more environmentally friendly and, ultimately, more connected.”

All voters will be entered into a draw where winners will be selected at random to receive one of 5 exclusive Tech Trailblazers Awards t-shirts or one of 5 year subscriptions to Prezi.

http://www.thedatachain.com/news/2012/11/tech_trailblazers_awards_finalists_announced

Wednesday 14 November 2012

Wonga Future 50: Iceotope


Proprietary technology that solves a clear problem in a mega, growing industry. This set of circumstances mark out a real market-busting entrepreneurial play.


Steve Jobs had a weird obsession: computer fans. The damn things whirr, eat electricity and get covered in cobwebs. He eliminated fans in Apple’s laptops whenever he could.

The datacentre industry has the same problem. The servers get seriously hot, and the current approach is to add more and more fans. They cost a ton of money, regularly need servicing, and powering them destroys any claim to being green.

The answer is Iceotope’s liquid cooling.

Developed with support from key partners including 3M and the University of Leeds, the Sheffield-based firm has a patented liquid cooling system which is far cheaper, far greener, and far more quiet than any fan configuration.

Is it a big deal?

Of course it is. The datacentre industry’s CO2 emissions are set to be on par with that of the airline industry within a few years' time and energy consumption continues to grow at 19 per cent per annum. Furthermore, the UK is believed to have the greatest concentration of datacentres on the planet at over seven million sq ft, consuming more than 6.4 GW of power per year (equivalent to six million households).

Founded in 2012, Iceotope is designed, engineered and manufactured in Great Britain.

Monday 22 October 2012

Iceotope Mentioned as Top 50 Hottest Early Stage Startups in the World


Last week's Dublin Web Summit was attended by 4,000 people. Attendees watched two days of speeches and exhibits by leaders in the technology industry. In addition, 250 startup companies set up in the conference halls, eager to share information, seek investors, and attract potential customers. 

Over 1,000 companies from 36 countries applied for the Electric Ireland Spark of Genius Award. Iceotope was selected as one of the top 50 award finalists, selected based on the combination of innovation with productivity to generate excitement and influence in a competitive environment.

Tuesday 9 October 2012

A sustainable cooling solution for servers


A unique cooling system using 3M™ Novec™ Engineered Fluids has been launched to provide a low cost, low energy solution to prevent servers from over-heating.

Designed, engineered and manufactured by Sheffield-based Iceotope Research and Development Ltd in conjunction with 3M and the University of Leeds, the integrated server platform reduces the energy used to cool IT equipment by 97 per cent as it doesn’t need chillers and air conditioning units.
Data centres currently account for around 5 per cent of the UK’s energy consumption and it costs just as much to cool servers using air conditioning systems as it does to run them.

“Researchers predict that the world’s data centres will consume 19 per cent more energy in the next 12 months than they have in the past year,” said Peter Hopton, founder and chief technical officer of Iceotope. “In order to try to combat this increase in power consumption, we need to start looking at technology that will help not only reduce the environmental footprint, but also help reduce the costs associated with power and cooling in data centres and other high-performing computing environments.

“Through our research with the University of Leeds and 3M, we’re excited about the impact our solution will have on data centre design and location.”

With Iceotope’s innovative liquid system, servers are encapsulated in a sealed unit with 3M™ Novec™ fluids acting as an inert coolant. This eliminates the need for air conditioning and harvests the heat from 20 kilowatts of IT equipment using just 80 watts of power. The harvested heat can then be reused or passively cooled.

As the system is silent and fully sealed with the electronics protected from the environment, the need to locate servers in a ‘clean building’ away from people is reduced. This creates the added benefit of providing more flexibility for the location of servers and has the potential to reduce the costs associated with purpose-built clean data rooms.

Said Keith Deakin, principal design engineer for Iceotope Research and Development: “The system has been designed to provide a sustainable end-to-end liquid cooling system for whole data centres. The motherboard is encapsulated in a sealed module containing a Novec fluid and this is used to harvest the heat from every component on the board. The heat is then transferred into a separate sealed water channel within the cabinet.

“Gravity, combined with a simple pump, moves the water around the circuits in the cabinet and the heat is then transferred through heat exchangers connected back to the building’s water supply.
“Our ethos is to keep the servers at their optimum working temperature by using as little energy as possible.”

The 3M™ Novec™ Engineered Fluid was chosen by Iceotope as it is a high-performing inert chemical coolant with environmental benefits.

Said Keith: “As well as being very good at convecting heat away from the heat-generating components on the motherboard, Novec fluid’s environmental impact is as low as we can find for such a coolant. It is thermally stable, non-ozone depleting and has a very low global warming potential.”

3M sales manager, Adrian Hyner, and technical sales specialist for 3M’s Electronics Markets Materials division, Mark Nursall, have worked closely with Iceotope on the development of the solution since the company was set up as an offshoot of a computer firm three years ago.

Said Mark: “Novec fluids have excellent heat-transfer properties compared to other dielectric fluids and is recyclable, offering an excellent balance between performance, safety and the environment.“Using a non-flammable coolant rather than a potentially flammable solution improves safety as well as making a dramatic overall reduction in electricity costs.

“The system also incorporates the latest award-winning high performance 3M™ Twin Axial Cables to transmit high speed data signals from the module to the back panel. In addition, 3M™ Scotchcast™ resin has been used to seal the entry point to the module. The introduction of these additional 3M technologies further enhanced the cost and performance benefits of the Iceotope platform solution.”

The Iceotope system been tested at a Swiss bank and is also being tested in operation at leading research universities in the UK and will be available for delivery towards the end of the year.

http://solutions.3m.co.uk/wps/portal/3M/en_GB/4Sight/home/-/topstories/5/?WT.svl=f1top5

Tuesday 2 October 2012

Elektra Awards Finalists


A panel of independent judges has made its decisions as part of the Elektra European Electronics Industry Awards 2012, and the shortlisted finalists in each of the award categories are published below.

The winners will be announced at an
Elektra Awards Dinner and Christmas Party which takes place on Wednesday 12th December at the Park Plaza, Westminster Bridge in London.

The established annual highpoint of the electronics industry, the
Elektra Awards gives the industry the opportunity to recognise the achievements of individuals and companies across Europe. They are designed to promote best practice in key areas including, innovation, sales growth and employee motivation.

Awards shortlists

Design Team of the Year
(Sponsored by CadSoft Computer)

ByteSnap Design - Design of vehicle charging posts for London 2012
eosemi - Design of an all-CMOS replacement for crystal oscillators
TT electronics – Design a medical implant for treating high blood pressure

 
Distributor of the Year
(Sponsored by IC Resources)

Anglia Components
Caltest Instruments
Farnell element14
Mouser Electronics
RS Components
TTI


Green Electronics Award
(Sponsored by National Instruments)

ebm-papst Mulfingen - CO2 emissions reduction at European facilities
Ericsson Power Modules – Reduction in life-cycle impact of products in operation
Farnell element14 - Packaging recycling project including free customer collection
TT electronics - Sensor product uses 42% less in plastic packaging


Manufacturer Export Award
(Sponsored by Agilent Technologies)

Marl International
United EMS
Zytronic


New Company of the Year
(Sponsored by International Rectifier)

Gnodal
Iceotope
Triggertrap


Educational Support Award
(Sponsored by Pinnacle Marketing Communications)

Aeroflex - £2.5m investment in wireless labs at Lancaster University and University College London
Analog Devices - University programme provides “hands-on learning”
Harwin - University programme providing technical, sponsorship and free products
Parallel Systems - Provides free Cadence OrCAD software to UK students
Rohde & Schwarz - €7.5m in financial assistance given to European universities
Silica - A competition prize of £3,000 for three UK university students


Design Tools and development software Award
ByteSnap Design - SnapUI lightweight development framework
Cadence Design Systems – Encounter analysis system for 3D ICs
CadSoft Computer - CAD tool with ASCII XML data structure
Mentor Graphics - RealTimeCalibre tool provides sign-off DFM feedback
Synopsys - Out-of-the-box support for ARM big.LITTLE processing designs
Xilinx – Vivado FPGA design tool supports C++ to HDL


Embedded System Product of the Year
Altera - 28nm system-on-chip FPGA
Freescale Semiconductor - Kinetis L series ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller
Intersil - Pico-qHD low cost pico projector system
Maxim Integrated Products - Smart meter platform with integrated security
RFEL - Fast Fourier transform FPGA core
Silicon Laboratories - Precision32 crystal-less USB controller


Passive & Electromechanical Product of Year
(Sponsored by Arrow)

AVX - 75V single-anode tantalum polymer capacitor
Harting - Han-Fast Lock high current PCB connector
Murata - Low ESR, electrical double layer capacitor
Melexis – Triaxis Hall effect magnetic sensor
Omron Electronic Components – G8P relay with large contact gap for high voltages
Syfer Technology - Multilayer chip capacitors with protective coating


Power System Product of the Year
(Sponsored by Harting Technology Group)

Amantys - Power Drive gate driver module
Cree - High efficiency 50A silicon carbide devices
Linear Technology - µModule isolated DC-DC converter with transformer
N2Power – Small 260W AC-DC power supply
Powervation - PV3101 single phase digital DC/DC controller
SemiSouth Laboratories - 650V silicon carbide JFET


Renewable Energy Design Award
(Sponsored by MSC Gleichmann UK)

Analog Devices - ADP1046 power controller
Diverse Energy - fuel cell technology
Heliatek – Organic photovoltaic material
Zeta Specialist Lighting - Solar powered paddle for lighting road signs


Semiconductor Product of the Year - Analogue
(Sponsored by Mouser Electronics)

ams - AS3935 Franklin lightning sensor IC
Linear Technology – LTC4366 overvoltage protection controller for 9-500V
Integrated Device Technology – IDT 90E46 single phase power metering SoC International Rectifier - PowIRstage integrated buck gate driver, mosfets and Schottky diode
Maxim Integrated Products – MAX44007 digital ambient light sensor
Microsemi - Low power body area network IC


Semiconductor Product of the Year - Digital
(Sponsored by Rohde & Schwarz)

Altera - Combining FPGA with optical transceiver modules in a single package
Freescale - Vybrid microcontroller combines ARM Cortex-A5 and Cortex-M4 cores
Lattice Semiconductor - iCE40 low power mobileFPGAs
LSI - SandForce SSD flash storage processor
Texas Instruments – Wolverine MSP430 microcontroller
Xilinx - Virtex-7 FPGAs with stacked silicon interconnect technology


Solid-State Lighting Application Award
(Sponsored by Anglia)

Arrow Electronics - LEDagon reference design combines LEDs with thermal management and control
Cree - XSP series high efficiency LED street light
LED Engin - ViviLux family of high-efficiency LED emitters
OMC - Spectralux Light Engines for all-in-one LED lighting design
Oxley Developments - LED aircraft landing light suitable to replace halogen technology
Plessey Semiconductors – Magic series high brightness LEDs on a gallium nitride-on-silicon substr
ate



Test Product of the Year
Agilent Technologies - Infiniium 90000Q 63GHz oscilloscope
JTAG Technologies - AutoBuzz automated boundary-scan software
LeCroy - LabMaster 10Zi 65GHz oscilloscope
Newton’s 4th - PPA1500 power analyser
National Instruments - PXIe-5644R RF vector signal transceiver, software-designed instrument
Rohde & Schwarz - ZNB network analyser
Yokogawa - Software package for the testing standby power


Other special awards
Rising Star New Engineer of the Year(Sponsored by Farnell element14)
University Department of the Year
(Sponsored by RS Components)

New Product - Product Innovation Award (Sponsored by Avnet Electronics Marketing EMEA)
Company of the Year
Lifetime Achievement Award

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/03/10/2012/54687/elektra-awards-finalists.htm

Tuesday 25 September 2012

Damned Statistics...



Do you know your PUE from your FVER? Energy metrics are now regarded as a key means of demonstrating your 'greenness'. But which system should you be considering?

Popular efficiency metrics such as PUE (power usage effectiveness) have undoubtedly been successful in getting the data centre industry to wise up to the problem of energy efficiency. However, while many organisations have followed its principles with rigour, its popularity has led some in the industry to 'juke' the stats, rendering hollow figures, rather than useful efficiency measurements.

This was one of Greenpeace's main concerns in its 'How green is your cloud report' (featured in Green IT), as businesses were able to provide low PUE figures, it stated, without actually being energy efficient or environmentally responsible.

 PUE is by no means the only efficiency metric within the data centre industry, of course, but no other has achieved the same level of adoption industry-wide. The new data centre energy efficiency metric FVER (Fixed to Variable Energy Ratio) aims to change all that. Rather than measuring IT in the same way you would utility services such as water and electricity, FVER targets waste. It might serve the industry well in the future to incorporate measures such as this as part of a wider efficiency strategy within data centres - and to use any metric as only one factor in efficiency measurement, rather than the be-all and end-all statistic. "It's on the basis of PUE's success that we can now evaluate the potential of new efficiency metric FVER to help improve current efficiency measures and instil necessary behavioural changes within the industry," asserts Peter Hopton, Iceotope CTO and founder.

"Given that FVER is measured as a determinate figure from one to infinity, like PUE the lower the number, the better. This makes it likely to be understood and embraced by C level executives, as well as data centre operators."

 The premise behind FVER is simple; it assumes your data centre is made up of a sum of two loads, a fixed load that would exist, if the data centre was inactive, and a variable load that would be maxed out when the data centre was full to capacity. This metric allows data centre operators to measure the difference between the two states and, as a result, evaluate the efficiency of their systems.

LARGER IMPACT
"In crude terms, the greater the difference between the fixed and variable energy figures, the lower the FVER figure," Hopton explains "But, crucially, the fixed energy figure has a significantly larger impact on the solution than the variable energy figure. As a result, this metric encourages data centre operators to target the fixed load, rather than the variable energy, and following this method could lead to data centres operating much more efficiently.

EASY CHOICE "
To put forward an example, if your data centre's average server utilisation is ten per cent and you are given two options - reduce the fixed load or reduce the peak power consumption, while keeping the fixed load constant - which would you choose? Reducing the fixed load will be nine times more effective than reducing the peak power consumption. FVER is reflective of this, and makes both energy waste and potential efficiency gains much more visible." With technology in general, functional value is largely consistent with energy/ resources used or financial expenditure. "For example, you'd expect your television to require more energy when transmitting video than when on standby, your car to use more fuel when in motion than when stationary and to be charged more by your mobile provider for your current model than the long forgotten handset locked away in a desk drawer," he points out. The data centre industry does not follow this system, as a rule. Energy used remains at a somewhat consistent level, regardless of the 'useful work' being conducted - this ensures costs also remain high when minimal work is actually being done. "As puzzling as this may sound, what really baffles is that these facilities may not even be considered inefficient," adds Hopton. "In fact, dependent on the metrics and measurements used, they may be seen as running highly efficiently." Like all metrics, FVER is not perfect. Systems such as liquid cooling will have a worse FVER rating than an air cooled system, despite being much more efficient - as fans are a strong (but wasteful) variable load. "FVER will, however, cause people to think about the fans inside their servers, encouraging them to throttle down. FVER also targets software, encouraging it to allow the server to reduce its power consumption when the software is underutilised."

PART OF THE WHOLE
Ultimately, FVER should be used as part of a larger sustainability structure, utilised alongside other measures and efficiency metrics like PUE and combined with straightforward common sense, Hopton advises. "Whether there could be an efficiency metric that covers all areas of energy efficiency, or indeed whether there should be, is a debate for another time," he suggests. "If FVER can somehow help users recognise where their systems are wasteful or inefficient, this could pave the way for substantial energy efficiency measures in the future, similar to those we first saw with the introduction of PUE."

NEXT PPRIORITY
BCS data centre specialist group secretary and Romonet CTO Liam Newcombe is another advocate for FVER. "A major part of the potential efficiency improvement in the data centre is now locked up in the fixed 'base-load' power draw. Correcting this issue should be the next priority for data centre operators and the wider industry," he argues. "In an ideal data centre, whatever the power draw, when the IT platforms are at peak load, it would be zero when the IT platforms are delivering no services. The DC FVER metric provides a way for operators to measure how well their IT and site energy consumption tracks the useful work delivered by their IT platforms." Peter Hopton, Iceotope CTO and founder.

Wednesday 19 September 2012

Iceotope wins Startup Product of the Year



Guests gathered at Dartmouth House, Mayfair, last week to celebrate their achievements and the participants represented the very best and most innovative cases within the IT industry today.

This award acknowledges Iceotope’s innovative liquid cooling system, launched earlier in the year, which can provide full-time free cooling for IT anywhere on the planet. Techworld’s Startup Product of the Year award is given to ‘the best and the brightest innovators’ and is intended to predict the products and services which will most impact the IT industry in the future and business practices in general.

Sheffield's Iceotope was recognised not only for its current application within the IT industry, but also its capability to address some of the most pressing issues expected to arise in the future – including IT’s rising energy usage, the spiralling costs of running a data centre and the need to find sustainable IT solutions.

Peter Hopton, CTO at Iceotope, says, “We are thrilled with this win for our cooling solution – years of research and development have been involved, and we have had fantastic support from organisations like 3M and the University of Leeds throughout. It’s great to see this hard work being rewarded and knowing that truly innovative and disrupting technology still gets the recognition it deserves."

http://www.blmforum.net/en/blm/IT/1069

Monday 17 September 2012

Iceotope Wins Techworld's Startup Product of the Year!


Iceotope’s liquid cooling system, capable of providing 24/7 free cooling anywhere on the planet, is recognised for its impact on the IT industry.


Iceotope is proud to announce that its liquid cooling solution has been named ‘Startup Product of the Year’ at this year’s Techworld Awards – an accolade determined by an esteemed panel of judges including key members the IT press, industry analysts and experts .

Rewarding all sectors within the IT industry, the Techworld Awards honoured companies, teams and projects across 11 separate categories at the awards ceremony last week. Guests gathered at Dartmouth House, Mayfair, London on Thursday 13th September to celebrate their achievements and the participants represented the very best and most innovative cases within the IT industry today.

This award acknowledges Iceotope’s innovative liquid cooling system, launched earlier in the year, which can provide full-time free cooling for IT anywhere on the planet. Techworld’s ‘Startup Product of the Year’ award is given to ‘the best and the brightest innovators’ and is intended to predict the products and services which will most impact the IT industry in the future and business practices in general.

Iceotope was recognised not only for its current application within the IT industry, but also its capability to address some of the most pressing issues expected to arise in the future – including IT’s rising energy usage, the spiralling costs of running a data centre and the need to find sustainable IT solutions.

 “We are thrilled with this win for our cooling solution – years of research and development have been involved, and we have had fantastic support from organisations like 3M and the University of Leeds throughout. It’s great to see this hard work being rewarded and knowing that truly innovative and disrupting technology still gets the recognition it deserves,” commented Peter Hopton, CTO at Iceotope.

Thursday 13 September 2012

Conference platform for city's technology...



GREEN technology from Sheffield that cuts down on waste heat is to go on show at a political party conference. City-based Iceotope will showcase its technology - designed to cut data centre energy bills by half and re-use the waste heat they generate - at next month's Conservative Party Conference.

lceotope is one of a dozen fina lists in a competition to reward innovative startups that was launched by Prime Minister David Cameron and is backed by Fujitsu, lrunarsat and the British Venture Capital Association.

Peter Hopton, from lceotope, the founder of eco-friendly PC company, VeryPC, said: "This is a great honour for lceotope as it gives us a fantastic opportunity to showcase our technology to scores of influential people. "We knew a diverse group of organisations would be se lected in order to highlight the very best of UK innovation. "We feel that Iceotope has the potential to revolutionise the data centre industry as we know it, which is why we wanted to be included." Simon Blagden, from Fujitsu said the finalists were all motivated and optimistic people with an innovative approach and a strong understanding of the marketplace they were targeting.

http://www.thestar.co.uk/

Wednesday 12 September 2012

Liquid cooling halves data centre power Designed in Sheffield




Steve Bush
Wednesday 12 September 2012 10:03

Sheffield-designed liquid cooling halves data centre power needsSheffield start-up Iceotope can dramatically cut, by over 90%, the cooling overhead of data centres, and increases the computational density of server racks, by moving to liquid cooling.

Conventional servers are cooled by air, with fans bowing over processor heatsinks.

Resulting hot air is cooled by a heat-exchanger in the back of the cabinet, or air conditioning units elsewhere in the server room.

On top of the power consumed by the server electronics "you have to add at least 20% because of the fans in the rack, and the air conditioning can bring this up to 120% of the electronic load", Iceotope CTO and system inventor Peter Hopton told Electronics Weekly. "Some back-cooled air-cooled racks can get down 50-90% of processor power, but they struggle to get 20kW-worth of electronics inside the rack."

Hopton's claims is that he can get 22kW worth of servers into a rack, and get that heat out to the environment, with only 4% extra energy.

Behind the Iceotope cooling technique are two main ideas: keep the heat in liquid, so that air never needs to be handled, and avoid refrigeration, with its power-hungry compressors.

To implement liquid cooling, almost everything in an Iceotope server rack is different, and made in the UK.

Sheffield-designed liquid cooling halves data centre power needsThe only thing that stays the same are off-the-shelf blade server motherboards, each of which is mounted inside its own sealed hot-swappable 'cartridge', which is flooded with primary coolant - a novel liquid from 3M called Novec.

Novec is both compatible with electronics and fireproof, but its most extreme characteristic is its capacity to remove heat through natural convection.

"Novec is very convective, said Hopton. "It has high thermal expansivity - 20x more than water - and low viscosity, which means it convects 20-40x better than water."

Its thermal capacity is lower than water, said Hopton, but the overall effect is 10-15x better heat removal than if the Novec was replaced with un-pumped water.

To take heat out of the Novec, there is a secondary circuit with water snaking through a channel inside one wall of the cartridge, supplied through two self-sealing fluid valve/connectors at the back.

One litre of water per minute gaining 5°C is enough to extract 400W of heat from the server motherboard, with only 20W escaping into surrounding air.

"The meander channel is large, so it has a low pressure drop, and the pressure drop of the valve is small too," said Hopton.

The rack's cooling water comes from a reservoir at the top of the rack (which Iceotope calls a plenum), flowing into a bottom reservoir through 60 parallel paths, one through each cartridge - 48 blades and 12 PSUs.

Overall pressure drop through each path is low enough, said Hopton, that gravity is sufficient to push the required litre per minute through the cartridges.

"The only need for a pump is to return 60 litres of water to the top plenum. One 40W pump would suffice. We have two pumps - 80W in total," said Hopton.

And this is the source of Iceotope's headline marketing claim that it can shift 22kW from a cabinet at the cost of only 80W.

Sheffield-designed liquid cooling halves data centre power needs


Two pumps mean dual redundancy to keep the servers working after one failure.

For the same reason, there are two heat exchangers at the bottom of the cabinet, one per pump, to transfer heat from secondary loop to a tertiary and final water loop which takes heat out of the building.

"Water in from the external circuit can be at up to 45°C, and water out will be at a maximum of 50°C," said Hopton.

As returning water only has to be cooled to 45°C, this can be done by simple outdoor radiators almost any where in the world, providing that they are in the shade. There is no need for refrigeration and its attendant energy cost from compressors, said Hopton.

As external cooling is passive, the total energy budget is 22kW of heat per rack from the electronics, 80W/rack from the rack pumps, plus the energy required to pump the tertiary circuit.

According to Hopton, modelling by a third-party data centre simulation firm predicts that cooling is always possible for a total of 4% over the power budget of the electronics - including pumping twin tertiary loops, and sprayed water evaporative cooling water to boost the outside radiators in extreme weather.

"Even in Houston Texas in mid-summer, we can still get 45°C water back to cabinet with some evaporative cooling," he said.


ElectronicWeekly

Thursday 6 September 2012

A sustainable cooling solution for servers


A unique cooling system using 3M™ Novec™ Engineered Fluids has been launched to provide a low cost, low energy solution to prevent servers from over-heating.
Designed, engineered and manufactured by Sheffield-based Iceotope Research and Development Ltd in conjunction with 3M and the University of Leeds, the integrated server platform reduces the energy used to cool IT equipment by 97 per cent as it doesn’t need chillers and air conditioning units.
Data centres currently account for around 5 per cent of the UK’s energy consumption and it costs just as much to cool servers using air conditioning systems as it does to run them.
“Researchers predict that the world’s data centres will consume 19 per cent more energy in the next 12 months than they have in the past year,” said Peter Hopton, founder and chief technical officer of Iceotope. “In order to try to combat this increase in power consumption, we need to start looking at technology that will help not only reduce the environmental footprint, but also help reduce the costs associated with power and cooling in data centres and other high-performing computing environments.
“Through our research with the University of Leeds and 3M, we’re excited about the impact our solution will have on data centre design and location.”
With Iceotope’s innovative liquid system, servers are encapsulated in a sealed unit with 3M™ Novec™ fluids acting as an inert coolant. This eliminates the need for air conditioning and harvests the heat from 20 kilowatts of IT equipment using just 80 watts of power. The harvested heat can then be reused or passively cooled.
As the system is silent and fully sealed with the electronics protected from the environment, the need to locate servers in a ‘clean building’ away from people is reduced. This creates the added benefit of providing more flexibility for the location of servers and has the potential to reduce the costs associated with purpose-built clean data rooms.
Said Keith Deakin, principal design engineer for Iceotope Research and Development: “The system has been designed to provide a sustainable end-to-end liquid cooling system for whole data centres. The motherboard is encapsulated in a sealed module containing a Novec fluid and this is used to harvest the heat from every component on the board. The heat is then transferred into a separate sealed water channel within the cabinet.

Tuesday 4 September 2012

UK data centre vendor Iceotope suspends server chips in liquid

Liquid cooled modules that offer better efficiency launched at CeBit
The first modules compatible with Iceotope's cooling system each contain two of Intel's new six-core Romley E5-2600 processors. A rack can hold 48 of them, the company said. The modules are loaded from the front and back of the rack, which does not need the hot aisle/cold aisle arrangement common in air-cooled data centres.
While some server manufacturers take a half-hearted approach to liquid cooling, pumping fluid through the heatsinks on top of key components such as processors, Iceotope goes all-in, immersing half-size SSI (Server System Infrastructure) motherboards in Novec, an inert cooling fluid developed by 3M, and sealing them inside special modules. The cooling fluid carries the heat away from the motherboard through convection before giving it up to a heat exchanger through which water is pumped at low pressure, according to Iceotope CTO Peter Hopton.
Iceotope can cool an entire 20kW rack with a pump consuming just 70W, whereas some air-cooled servers contain fans rated at 200W or more per shelf, Hopton said. The Iceotope system warms the water by just 5 degrees Celsius, and can operate with incoming water temperatures of up to 45C, which means year-round free-air cooling is possible almost anywhere on the planet, he said.
A cabinet will cost just under £20,000, including two heat exchangers, two water pumps, two power supply units and all the necessary chassis. The first processor modules, each containing two of Intel's new six-core Romley E5-2600 processors, 64Gbytes of RAM and SSD storage, start at £3,995.

 
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The boards in the first modules come from Supermicro, and Iceotope will sell the modules through some of Supermicro's channel partners, Hopton said.

Iceotope prices its modules at 20 percent above equivalent air-cooled equipment. "We like that number because it's known that lifetime power costs are greater than capital equipment costs, and we save 20 you percent of the cooling cost," he said.

While Iceotope's servers aren't the cheapest around, Vik Malyala of Supermicro sees a market for them among the cost-conscious. "This is for people trying to bring the overall cost of operating a data centre down," he said.

Hopton hinted that data centre cooling could even become a profit centre rather than a cost centre: The waste heat in the cooling water could be reclaimed, using a heat pump to concentrate it for use in district heating systems in offices or housing near the data centre.

 
ComputerWorld UK

Iceotope touts super liquid cooling for data centres

Using 3M’s Novec coolant, the company claims it can cut cooling costs to zero.
By Jennifer Scott
ServersIceotope today announced a new technique of cooling servers, which it claims can make fans redundant and cooling costs non-existent.
The launch happened at this year’s CeBIT conference in Hanover, Germany, with the company also saying the solution cuts 75 per cent of the mechanical costs associated with cooling servers.
Cost savings on the maintaining side might be plentiful, but the set-up price is no drop in the ocean

The product uses 3M’s Novec liquid as a coolant, which Peter Hopton, founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Iceotope, called the “environmentally friendly little brother” of Fluoroinert – 3M’s previous coolant incarnation.
A water jacket containing Novec wraps around components and travels through the servers in fast currents at a rate of centimetres per second. With its low surface tension, the coolant “gets into all the cracks” to absorb the heat from servers and take it away to heat exchanges, where the liquid can either be cooled or used to heat other buildings and water within the complex.

The technology can not be incorporated into existing servers, however, and businesses would have to buy new servers – or modules as Iceotope refers to them – to install the technology.

Cost savings on the maintaining side might be plentiful, but the set-up price is no drop in the ocean.

Customers can buy cabinets, featuring six server modules – which look like blades – as well as the pump and heat exchanges, for £19,995. However, the cabinets can house up to 48 modules, which start at £3,995 for fully configured servers containing two six core Xeon E5 processors, 64GB RAM, 40Gb Infiniband and SSD storage. Users are able to choose between AMD and Intel processors.

Hopton told IT Pro the technology could soon roll-out across the data centre, with products for switches, routers and GPUs in the pipeline. He defended the upfront prices though, saying the overall benefits would save a lot more money in the long term.

“No chiller equipment is needed so when you are kitting out a new data centre, you don’t need to buy it,” he said.

“It is not massively expensive and if you need new servers… it is cost effective when you start to look at the money saved on energy consumption.”

Although he couldn’t confirm any UK customers yet, Hopton did say it was being implemented within UK data centres and the test company would be revealed soon.

  ITPro (web)
6 Mar 2012

Green IT: something smells PUEy – who let marketing near the metrics?

Peter Hopton, green IT entrepreneur and Iceotope founder, says the popular data centre efficiency metric PUE is being abused by marketeers, rendering hollow figures rather than useful efficiency measurements.
Everyone in the data centre industry and a surprising number of people outside of the industry can now tell you that PUE is a measure of energy efficiency in a data centre and that lower is better.

PUE or Power Usage Effectiveness is an instantaneous measurement of the ratio between total power consumption and IT power consumption in a data centre. As a result, PUE can and does vary over the year.

So strictly speaking if you report your PUE publicly, you should take the average over the year, no? You might, however, find that reported PUE’s represent the system’s best performance or worse – its theoretical best performance. This 'design PUE' is common in new unpopulated data centres which will have a very high PUE due to the fixed load of the cooling outweighing the insignificant IT load, a new data centre in these conditions could have a PUE of 7, which will settle down to 1.6 after it becomes populated.

Justifying a low PUE rating
Prefixing PUE doesn’t just stop at design modelling, you may find people talking about pPUE, mPUE or some other prefix that isn’t defined in the standard. This is because they are attempting to define a particular set of conditions outside of the standard of the metric in order to justify a low PUE claim. Some experts in the industry have suggested that in the case of mPUE, the m simply stands for marketing!

You also might find low PUEs being claimed by organisations that look to ignore or subtract some loads from their 'total power consumption’ such as measuring power consumption on the low voltage side of the transformer – saving them 0.05 off their PUE. Other tricks include turning the lights off or switching the UPS into bypass or line interactive mode when taking the measurements, but then flicking it back into double conversion shortly after as they don’t trust it will kick in fast enough in a power event.
And then there are designs that don’t break the standard that is PUE, but find interesting engineering work-arounds in order to reduce it:

• Some organisations are reducing their data centre cooling energy, but specifying servers with larger fans – moving the cooling energy into the IT load. It is estimated that as much as 20 per cent of IT load is fans moving air through the device to cool it

• Facebook uses lighting run over POE (power over Ethernet), which means the lighting and energy transmission losses are included in the IT load. A 25W POE device requires about 40W of power at the POE switch’s input, the remaining 15W is lost as heat over the cable or in the switch PSU

With the Green Grid having no plans to certify or involve itself in disputes over the PUE metric manipulations are only going to increase, so the next time you see a PUE claim that looks too good to be true, it probably is.

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23rd August 2012

Friday 31 August 2012

Green Options



Datacentres eat power like there's no tomorrow. They consume a widely accepted estimate of somewhere close to 2. 5 per cent of all the power produced in industrialised countries. But this figure needs to stabilise, at the very least. This is partly because datacentre running costs are under pressure from end users, and partly due to international carbon reduction commitments. Number-crunching financial services companies
tend, of course, to be the largest consumers of datacentre services: after staff, IT consumption is usually the biggest cost faced by the sedor. So outside of Silicon Valley, banks and insurance companies can make a huge contribution to creating' greener' and therefore more efficient datacentres.
According to the Uptime Institute, the datacentre research group, it costs $23,000 per kilowatt, on average, to build a datacentre. Half of that cost however, is not spent on processing or securing information - it goes on keeping servers cool. Some trailblazers have already taken great strides to reduce their cooling expenditure. In January of last year, Deutsche Bank opened an 'Eco Data Centre' in the New York City area that, among other things, takes advantage of outside air for free cooling. Closer to home, Next generation Data (NGD) Europe has built one of the world's largest and greenest facilities, available to large
corporations, which registers a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.2. The Uptime Institute recognises 1.8 as the average PUE figure. And just yards outside the City of London. lnterxion has built a new facility, LON2, which is powered exclusively by renewable energy and saves on power by only cooling parts of server stacks as and when needed with computer room air conditioners (CRAC). lt runs a PUE rating of 1.4. Outsourced cooling Despite these advances, concerns over an overburdene <1 and increasingly expensive energy supply in the UK have led some users to look at relocation options. Verne Global is one company that caters for those looking for cheaper building options and lessening the risk of being a victim of future power spikes. The firm operates a datacentre campus in Keflavik, Iceland. Housed in
a former NATO air base, and powered by geothermal and hydroelectric energy, it is the first large-scale datacentre that takes advantage of the country's unique environmental circumstances. "Iceland has some truly unique solutions, • says Verne Global's vice president, Issac Kato. "(lt) can offer something called free
cooling all year round, 24 hours a day, so we reduce all carbon emissions associated with datacentre power consumption. We also have very long-term stable priced power contracts that we can pass on to customers for up to 20 years (matched with annual inflation). So we offer a low energy risk to our customers.·
"We have created one of the most economically and environmentally friendly datacentres in the world and passed onto our customers a 50 per cent or more energy reduction and a massive reduction in carbon footprint," he adds. Apart from high frequency trading, most system applications can be handled in Iceland. Kato says that Verne has already had one investment bank tell it that 60-80 per cent of all the bank's
applications could be placed in Iceland. "That includes anything that is computer intensive like grid-computing, virtual desktops and just general email," he says. No place like home Despite the obvious appeal of such a low cost model, reservations persist as to whether relocation is a sensible or even viable option.
"The Ideology of server hugging still exists." says Graeme Creasey. director of operations at Interxion.  People like to be close to their servers. And with very recent advances 10 server temperature control. they can remain so, he argues. "We utilise Adiabatic cooling (an evaporative cooling process) on the chillers
a lot more now because the technology has Improved that much. We're seeing less people moving out to places like the Nordic regions." What's more, relocating abroad involves an initial expense and Liquid cooling Staying closer to home could become even easier in the future with the advent of improved liquid cooling. This new solution not only saves on energy, but also cuts out thermal shocking; a term that describes the increased server failure rates caused by blowing cold air on hot components. Richard Barrington, chief sustainability officer at Icetope, says the firm has researched the area for a while and has now adopted a new approach, which looks to maintain a constant temperature in a datacentre, rather than cooling its
components when needed. "We immerse the whole of the motherboard, in a liquid called Novec, made by 3M," he explains. "lt has some great properties: it's brilliant at putting out fires, it doesn't conduct electricity and it's far more efficient than air at capturing heat and moving it. You can retrofit a datacentre and get cooling as close to the processing as possible." Icetope doesn't just use Novec to keep as constant a
temperature as possible, however. It then harvests the heat and allows a datacentre to actually re-use the heat. to maintain a general building temperature, for example. "It's a completely closed environment where we're not making massive demand on energy and we can cut the energy consumption of a datacentre
by 50 per cent," says Barrington. Liquid cooling won't work for everyone, however. As 40's Barker points out, in a eo-location facility where there is a mixture of server manufacturers, server models ·and equipment, providers have to stay with the more traditional, air-based cooling, to ensure a datacentre is suitable for anything a client may wish to install. Saving energy needn't involve new technology or re-vamped datacentres, however, especially for those at the start of the process. Andy Hawkins, a product manager within the innovations team at 1 E, an IT effioency solution provider, says that the f1rm finds that on average, clients have 15 per cent of their servers not doing anything useful at all. "That's a significant area of waste before you start digging into anything deeper than that." he says. Reimng m non-productive servers is a big money saver. 1 E  has calculated that 11 .8 million tons of C 02 are wasted by dormant or unproductive servers each year; the same amount produced by 2.1 million cars. 1 E installs software for firms to see if each server is doing what it was installed to do, namely provide value for business through use of an   application. With the rise of virtualisation, and the an additional headache when it comes to monitoring a datacentre. pnvate cloud, the tendency for IT to sprawl out of control is "lt would be extremely difficult to relocate in order to take strong. "You can stamp on sprawl and allow people to better advantage of cooler climates, "says David Barker, technical reclaim resources which are decaying 1nto a state of un-use," says
director at 40 Data Centres. "Aside from the upfront costs of a Hawk ins. "You could argue that whatever your energy large-scale relocation, the majority of our clients visit the facility consumption is, if you can prove that it's doing useful work and to work on their equipment and are within a fairly local you're getting value from the power you're drawing, then geographical catchment area." that is good:"

http://www.fstech.co.uk/fst/index.php

Wednesday 15 August 2012

Move Over PUE – Here Comes FVER!

PUE is a good data centre efficiency measure, but Peter Hopton thinks FVER might go one better
 
Metrics, they are not always perfect, but are a useful tool for us to measure our performance and improvement. PUE is a commonly used metric in the data centre industry, but there is room for more – and one of the most promising is called FVER.

PUE (power usage effectiveness) measures the waste in supporting mechanical and engineering (M&E) equipment by assessing the ratio of overall power to IT equipment power. Despite a little marketing abuse and users moving some of their loads into the IT equipment, PUE has been a success for the industry, driving common M&E efficiencies from wasteful to rather efficient.

FVER joins the PUE queue


Add caption
Now, enter a new metric supported by the British Computer Society’s Data Centre Specialist Group (DCSG), Fixed to Variable Energy Ratio, or FVER for short. FVER is not to be ignored, it’s the brainchild of Liam Newcombe, the man who led the best practice element of the EU Code of Conduct for data centres.

FVER attempts to target waste in the whole system (software, hardware, M&E and all) like PUE targets waste in M&E. FVER assumes your data centre is made up of a sum of two loads, a fixed load that would exist if the data centre was inactive, and a variable load that would be maxed out when the data centre was full to capacity. You can use measurement of output work and power consumption to establish (and if necessary interpolate) what these loads are and FVER is then calculated:

FVER = 1 + Fixed Energy/Variable Energy

(where normally Total Energy = Variable Energy + Fixed Energy)

Add caption

Like PUE, the target score is 1, but that is unlikely to ever be achieved. Real data centres will have a higher value – and less efficient data centres will have a much higher value of FVER. The concept is described in detail in a white paper from BCS: Data Centre Fixed to Variable Energy Ratio metric (DC-FVER).
Will FVER work? I hope so – the theory behind it is sound, as normally a data centre environment’s power consumption can be modelled as approximately linear, (ax+b), the sum of a fixed load (b) and a variable load (ax) that is approximately directly proportional to utilisation. By targeting the ratio you start to think about reducing the fixed load, which means an underutilised data centre will become much more efficient.

Will FVER catch fire?

To put forward an example, if your data centre’s average server utilisation is ten percent and you are given two options, reduce the fixed load or reduce the peak power consumption whilst keeping the fixed load constant, which would you choose? The answer is that reducing the fixed load will be nine times more effective than reducing the peak power consumption.
 
Like all metrics, it’s not going to be perfect, systems like liquid cooling for example will have a worse FVER than an air cooled system despite being much more efficient – as fans are a strong (but wasteful) variable load. FVER will however cause people to think about the fans inside their servers, encouraging them to throttle down. FVER also targets software, encouraging users to reduce server power consumption when the software is underutilised.
 
In summary, FVER is a simple metric to address a complex problem, and combined with measuring other metrics like PUE and a little bit of sensible behaviour; FVER could have some big benefits for the whole industry.
 
Peter Hopton is founder and technical director of Iceotope.
How much do you know about green tech? Try our quiz!

Techweek Europe
15  Aug 2012

Monday 30 July 2012

Building a better data centre

 Richard Barrington, chief sustainability officer at Iceotope

 
Increasing demands of a growing population coupled with energy intensive lifestyles leads to major challenges for those who source, produce, distribute and consume energy.

 The UK is not immune to this challenge -indeed many projections suggest demand for energy will outstrip supply as early as 2015,with service interruptions affecting electricity supply soon after.

 This has major implications for the data centre industry, which within a developed nation such as the UK, accounts for more than ten percent of all energy consumed, and is equal to more than 6,000,000 households and growing. Given that in some data centres more than two thirds of the energy is used for cooling, and in almost all cases the heat generated by the ICT is treated as waste, fundamental changes need to be made.

 A number of industry initiatives have attempted to tackle this problem and develop best practice, for example the Green Grid or the EU Code of Conduct, but these guidelines are all predicated on the current paradigm of blowing chilled air on hot electronics, with some forays into using ‘outside air ’,sometimes known as ‘free air cooling ’ ((climate and ambient temperature permitting).This system still treats the heat as waste, rather than a potential resource, and still requires large amounts of supplementary equipment.

 However, there are alternatives available now which address these concerns. Relocating data centres to the Arctic Circle is becoming a popular choice for many businesses but may not be feasible for those with regulatory concerns or geographical restrictions. Next generation liquid cooling, on the other hand, negates the need for such a move and provides free cooling regardless of location.

 Liquids are known to be up to 4,000 times more efficient at capturing and transferring heat than air, using much less energy to do so. However, adoption of liquid cooling has been patchy at best, either seen as a high end solution in super computer environments or as a bolt on within existing facilities.

 The reality is that the current generation of liquid cooling has failed to gain mass market acceptance because it has not been designed with the current operational requirements of the data centre in mind, that is modular, scalable, highly available, fully redundant and safe -until now.

 
A new blueprint

Rather than tweaking or re-engineering existing systems, disruptive technologies are transforming the entire data centre industry with wholesale changes at even the most basic level.

 In the current design process, consideration must be made for a variety of supplementary systems as well as the core IT servers. For instance, traditional facilities require chiller equipment, heat removal (and disposal)systems and separate heating apparatus. Even where free air cooling is possible for a percentage of the time, a complex and expensive Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) infrastructure is still required.

 In contrast, next generation liquid cooling systems, like those established by Iceotope, completely remove the need for chiller equipment or CRAC -freeing up large amounts of space and reducing the energy required to cool ICT by 97%.This also improves data centre density and means that the equipment used runs silently, enabling systems to be positioned inside busy populated locations such as research facilities with no detrimental effects.

 The flexibility of such spaces is vastly increased and there is less requirement for large, custom built structures. This solution also means that the heat harvested from the system may be used in the heating of local buildings, not only reducing the environmental footprint of the IT facility itself, but also of other facilities able to make use of the heat.

 By making use of an environmentally sound inert coolant,3M Novec, Iceotope ’s system is not only capable of reducing cooling power costs, but allows data centres to run neutral in terms of heat. The Iceotope Platform operates with facilities input temperatures of up to 45 °C, conforming to The American Society of Heating Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers standards (ASHRAE)as ‘W4 ’,the optimum temperature for liquid cooling. This temperature is key to providing free cooling anywhere on the planet, as the capability of taking such high input temperatures, whilst still being able to keep electronics cool, makes this system capable of functioning in even the most severe  conditions. In countries that experience extreme temperatures or even in equatorial and desert regions, where heat is always a major concern for compute environments,next generation liquid cooling is able to resolve such problems and still provide 24/7 free cooling.

 The next generation liquid cooling described in this article is set to disrupt the economics of the data centre industry in a major way. Given the potential energy and cost savings, this technology is not just innovative, it could force the market to rethink data centres all together.
 

30 July 2012
Connecting Industry