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:"

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