Many data centres are not built to make truly green computing practical

(21/10/2008)

There’s a lot of attention given to ‘greening’ the data centre: not surprisingly, given the global pressures on the world’s multinational companies. With a recent Environmental Protection Agency report in the US revealing that data centres were already taking 1.5 per cent of the nation’s power, and with that figure expected to double by 2011, there’s plenty of scope for companies who want to advertise their green credentials though more efficient power and resource management.

A greener, more efficient data centre is not only good for the environment, it should save on power costs and be ‘future proof’. It’s not common to find data centres up to 100,000sq ft with life expectancies greater than 20 years: the investment in design that you are making will have along-term impact on the company’s ability to compete.

The problem today is that we are often building the wrong type of data centre. The aspiration for greener data centres runs counter to many of the principles on which those data centres are designed. Worse, we’re attempting to upgrade many facilities in the short term which can never truly be ‘green’. As Gerhard Bosch, managing consultant for Site Enablement Services at IBM comments: ‘Most data centres in operation today are the product of tinkering, not engineering’.

Bosch should know: his many years of experience building and equipping data centres is informed by his training as an architect. His conclusion is that many of this generation of data centres are not built to make truly green computing practical. It’s time to think the unthinkable: it might be ‘greener’, and more efficient, to build a new generation of facilities.

The first problem is the basic construction of the buildings. Many data centres are built like offices, with elegant drop ceilings, windows, panel walls and so on. It’s a hangover from the time when data centres were converted office buildings. Today a purpose-built centre needs to have easily accessible cabling and cooling, remote management systems that can put building management and security on a converged IP network, and design that can cut down on the 70 per cent of power in data centres that is used for cooling or is just wasted in inefficiencies.

The architecture has to be built to take advantage of high-density servers, a people-free environment, and to deliver security and manageability as part of the construction – not to have these concepts added afterwards. Today Nexans supplied IP-based converged building management systems that reduce, rather than add to, complexity.

Dramatic improvements are realistic. IBM’s ‘Project Big Green’ aims to double the compute capacity of its data centres by 2010 without increasing the power consumption of carbon footprint. If the company can do that through more efficient design, it would save the equivalent of the energy consumed by Paris. The efficiencies that IBM has found in improving airflow and remote management of its servers are around 30 per cent. Use all the elements of today’s best practice on existing data centres, and the figure rises to 70 per cent improvement.

But today’s state of the art data centres can improve on power consumption by a staggering 80 per cent. By fundamentally changing the infrastructure of all our facilies we can radically change the CO2 emission of what Bosch calls ‘the factories of the 21st century’.

For example, when Cisco switched its building management worldwide to a converged IP network, it found that it could manage the security, the IT systems and all the other systems – communications for example - in 440 buildings worldwide from three locations in Australia, the UK and California.

An investment of $800,000 saves an annual $10.5 million in energy costs alone. ‘The IP network is the platform of the building,’ says Jesus Galindo, CCRE Director Europe at Cisco, and one the spearheads of the project, ‘but it’s not just about convergence on to an IP network – it’s the interaction between them’.

Converged networks and remote management have some impact on the green agenda, but to achieve meaningful green computing we need to go further. We need to reassess the technical goals that we strive for in our data centres. The ‘tier’ structure, which grades data centres into four groups, and the obsessive pursuit of ‘five nines’ availability - while useful benchmarks to make comparisons between facilities - represent technical rather than business goals.

It’s simply impossible to claim that a Tier 1 data centre is ‘green’. To respond to an environmental agenda, it is not enough to make token improvements to the carbon footprint while obsessively pursuing the sort of technical goals that make truly green computing an impossible dream.

If we start again, and decide what standards of performance the business truly needs, and how we balance that with the need to reduce emissions, and then how we best design an infrastructure from first principles may produce facilities that don’t conform to the ideas of the Tier structure. In that case it’s the classification, not the configuration that needs to change.

It’s the job of infrastructure companies - like Nexans, like IBM - that build and equip today’s IT facilities to help make these changes. But the change starts in aligning what a data centre can do, and how efficiently it can do it, to the business and environmental goals of the organization. While it’s no longer acceptable to ignore green issues, attempting to fiddle a fix will not deliver the fundamental changes that we need.

Related categories:  Energy efficiency   Industrial   Network and data cabling   Office and commercial