Energy saving in IT infrastructure

At a time of rising energy costs, environmental awareness and limited availability of power in many geographic areas, energy saving is more important to IT managers now than it has ever been:

Understanding Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) is the 1st step towards reducing power consumption. Knowing the power consumption of both the hardware and the elements required for support it such as AC systems and UPS is vital to learning where the inefficiencies exist before rectifying them. It is generally accepted that in most data centres every kW used to power a server requires a further 1.5kW in order to distribute and back up that power as well as remove the resulting heat.

This 1.5kW represents the best area for improvement with various technologies and processes available to reduce this amount:

UPS

All UPS consume some of the power that passes through them; typically 10-15 in most data centres this represents a significant amount both in terms of carbon and money. Replacing existing UPS with high efficiency models that typically only consume 3% of the power that passes through them can bring considerable savings in one fell swoop. CETEC offers a wide range of highly efficient UPS that in many cases can be installed with minimal disruption.

Power meters

In addition to more efficient UPS; installing power meters both within the racks and plant supporting the server room will give IT managers a much clearer picture of power usage enabling intelligence lead decisions to be made.

Cooling

In most cases the cooling system in a data centre is the main cause of waste and low PUE. Previous generations of hardware, with low heat output were tolerant of inefficiencies with most traditional hot aisle/cold aisle configurations operating at less than 30% efficiency. Newer generations of hardware such as blade servers and high density storage devices create so much heat that traditional, inefficient cooling methods would use disproportionate and prohibitive amounts of electricity in order to remove heat.

Many of the new solutions such as Usystems ColdLogik bring further energy savings by operating with higher water temperatures within the system. The outdoor chiller does not need to work as hard and consequentially uses less electricity.

The answer to this problem lies in relying less on airflow within the server room to carry the heat away from the hardware and use either contained water or CO2 to do the job. Taking this approach captures the heat much earlier on in the cooling process and prevents it from ending up in areas where it can cause serious problems.

Free Cooling

Another method for reducing the cooling system’s power consumption is to use free cooling; this can be applied when the outdoor ambient temperature is lower than the water temperature within the cooling system. A direct heat exchange can take place between the two without the use of compressors in the outdoor chiller. In the UK and northern Europe this would bring about a 75% reduction in the power consumption of the AC system.

Managing airflow within the cabinet is an easy method of increasing efficiency, installing blanking plates on all unused U space will ensure that all air entering the cabinet will perform some cooling duty instead of just passing through and exiting the cabinet without picking up any heat.

Going green in your server room or data centre does not have to be to the detriment of uptime and as well as doing our bit to protect the environment going green is good for business!