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Friday, December 5, 2008
Inside Real Estate
Establish an energy-efficient data center
MHT's Efrain Viscarolasaga: Solar installation booms in New England
MHT reporter Efrain Viscarolasaga on NECN: Green tech brings jobs back to Mass.
MHT's Cleantech Forum
Tens of thousands of people filled the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center last month for Greenbuild 2008, a three-day conference sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council, about how buildings can protect the environment and the health of the people who work in them. The conference showed that businesses are discovering that being a good corporate citizen goes beyond just “green” products to include buildings and all of a company’s resources.
Green buildings now being built are fashionable to talk about, but the real green impact is being made in existing buildings, which make up five times the square footage as new buildings. A company’s buildings and other facilities are a huge concern because they represent the second largest expense for most companies, behind only employees’ salaries and benefits.
Data centers are critical components of many organizations, and for companies interested in “greening” their facilities, they are a good place to start. Many businesses are looking for ways to provide greater storage capacity and computing performance while improving energy efficiency. This increase has coincided with the adoption of new blade server technology. Designed to provide maximum computing power with minimal attention to environmental issues, traditional data centers were intended to accommodate 2 to 3 kilowatts per rack. However, power requirements for blade servers today can be as high as 20 kilowatts to 30 kilowatts. In addition to increased power supply requirements, the new high density environments — with numerous blades packed tightly into a rack — generate significantly more heat than traditional servers, and therefore require more cooling capacity.
Manufacturers of equipment and controls for computing, cooling and power are responding with new technologies and products to improve the energy efficiency and environmental impact of data center operations. For example, new systems have been introduced that adjust air conditioning with IT equipment power loads and controls that modulate based on computing loads. For many new implementations, traditional air cooling is being replaced by chilled-water, liquid refrigerants and specialty cooling to supplement traditional raised-floor systems.
One common method to reduce the energy needed for cooling the data center is to replace multiple refrigerant-based cooling units with a “chiller” — a centralized, refrigerant-based water source cooling unit. Using this configuration, data center managers can take advantage of “free cooling” during cold months through the use of cooling towers and heat exchangers. (When using such free cooling, condenser water systems should incorporate freeze-protection technologies to permit cooling towers to operate reliably). Other benefits include reduced maintenance costs to service a single chiller as opposed to multiple condensers, and more environmentally friendly refrigerants, which are typically found in larger chillers but not in smaller cooling units.
Another way to reduce energy costs in the data center is by switching from costly electric humidification to ultrasonic humidification. Such systems use very little energy, provide high-quality moisture and enable close control of an environment while requiring little maintenance.
Many data centers are housed in old buildings with outdated equipment. For example, a cooling system in a central data-processing center may have been installed when the facility was originally built in the 1970s, with parts added over the years to address the heat generated by added servers. By replacing all of these units with a new, larger chiller, a facility could cut energy consumption by 15 percent.
Data center technology, including that used both in the servers that house the data and in a facility’s major building systems, has undergone significant changes in the time since many of the data centers in use today were constructed. Meanwhile, the energy requirements of data centers and the cost of the energy they require have continued to climb. Data center operators need to assess their current building systems in light of these changes. Facility and IT managers should assess the costs and benefits of the available alternatives based on business goals and objectives. Armed with detailed information about current building system needs and requirement costs, data centers can implement improvements that will allow them to support operational needs today while minimizing costs over the long term.
Lisa Raffin is vice president, professional services for VFA Inc., a Boston-based provider of software and services for facilities capital planning and asset management.
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