Keysource Blog

The Green Grid (www.thegreengrid.org) announced on 15th July that the Power Usage Effectiveness metric, which it published in 2007, has now achieved industry alignment specific to recommendations on how to measure PUE in dedicated data centre facilities.

The organization's report, "Recommendations for Measuring and Reporting Overall Data Center Efficiency - Version 1 - Measuring PUE at Dedicated Data Centers," documents the combined recommendation of The Green Grid in collaboration with 7x24 Exchange, ASHRAE, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, U.S. Department of Energy Save Energy Now Program, US Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star Program, United States Green Building Council, and Uptime Institute.

"Driving industry alignment of PUE through consistent measurement and reporting processes represents a significant step in improving data center energy efficiency," says Dan Azevedo, Symantec representative and Board member of The Green Grid. "The guidance specific to calculating PUE for data centers that use multiple energy sources (electric, natural gas, water, etc.) is substantial to ensuring PUE is measured and reported equitably. This task force is working to drive clear, consistent recommendations with a single voice"

Keysource says; Keysource were one of the first UK companies to sign up to become a member of the Green Grid in March 2007. Keysource appreciated this metric because of its simplicity; the metric identifies data centre infrastructure efficiency by comparing the total amount of energy consumed by the data centre to the total amount of energy consumed by the IT equipment. Ongoing measurement and fine tuning is the key. There is no question that the correct approach to energy reduction is to start measuring and establishing a ‘baseline and track performance’.  The PUE metric is a great starting point and easy to understand, however to truly uncover the potential savings, companies need to establish a robust, ongoing energy reduction programme. 

Energy efficient design of data centres is very important, particularly as we enter these more energy-sensitive times. Cooling is the largest power consumer within a data centre infrastructure - more so than the IT equipment itself. Therefore it’s essential to pick the right cooling solution to improve facility energy efficiency and reduce operational costs.

To explain further, server cooling  represents one of the critical challenges in data centre and other related technical spaces. Similar to a typical PC, servers require a power supply and need to expend heat roughly equal to the total electrical power input to the device. So air conditioning supply is an important design factor for technical spaces.

Mapping data centre airflow

Some companies use computational flow dynamics (CFD) software to model data centre airflow ; creating a 3D model of technical space. Not only does this software give an invaluable proof of concept, it shows key stakeholders a clear picture of how the facility will operate.

Recent data centre cooling project

Keysource’s expertise in data centre cooling involved them implementing a recent staged upgrade at Elsevier’s Kidlington data centre in Oxfordshire.  This project involved minimum disruption to working conditions for this leading science and health publisher. Half of the data centre air conditioning units   were replaced one by one. And ceiling returns and a very early smoke detection alert (VESDA) were installed to address air-flow issues.

The expertise demonstrated on this project has involved the company being re-engaged in electrical upgrade project with the publisher.

Cooling server rooms and data centres is critical to maintaining a robust technical space and more importantly, it carries important implications for all areas of facility management. Keysource take this very seriously in their best practice service delivery.

Keysource’s solid expertise in managing clients’ server room cooling ensures that they show clients the full range of available options; balancing both rack power density and energy efficiency elements. To help understand server cooling, it’s important to grasp these three key points:

• It’s vital to appreciate the power density needs of your IT equipment. And this not only means making sure your server room can accommodate today’s and future power demands. Flexibility and scalability are therefore important decision drivers for accommodating long-term server room expansions and changes.

• As server room cooling is regarded as the biggest power consumer, it’s essential that the cooling solution you adopt is optimised for efficiency. Consequently this measure will play a major role in reducing the large operating costs faced by your organisation.

• Lastly, fundamental to creating the best environmental conditions, is the need to fully understand and manage server room air flow. This involves looking at cool air supply such as server air conditioning, heat capacity of servers and heat rejection. Collectively these elements are critical to managing server room environments.

Contact data centre soultions specialists Keysource today for further advice.

The CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme is finally with us and will affect around 5,000 public and private sector organisations within the UK. Whilst at first glance the scheme looks like a significant financial outlay, those that work to drive down energy usage are likely to achieve savings well in excess of the cost of participation. Furthermore, it offers an added opportunity for companies to boost their reputation as energy-conscious organisations.

Anyone using 6,000 MWh of electricity, equivalent to an annual electricity bill of £500,000, will have to participate in the carbon emissions trading scheme, which is expected to reduce CO2 emissions by up to 11.6 million tonnes per year by 2020.

Those organisations involved will need to monitor their energy consumption and purchase allowances for the government of £12 each for every tonne of carbon dioxide it emits. Bearing in mind 6,000 MWh of electricity is equal to around 3,333 tonnes of CO2, participants will have to purchase a minimum of £40,000 of allowances per annum.

The scheme is revenue-neutral overall meaning revenue raised is re-distributed back to participants, with the highest-ranking organisations from a Government-published league table receiving the greatest financial benefits. Therefore, those successful in reducing energy consumption will not only save on energy bills but will need to purchase fewer allowances and receive higher rewards from revenue recycling.

The data centre can make up as much as a third of an organisation’s power usage, so there is plenty of scope to improve performance levels to generate long-term, bottom line benefits and reduce carbon footprint.

Original article written Jessica Twentyman and published on Sourcing Focus.com: http://www.sourcingfocus.com/index.php/site/featuresitem/2329/

In the race to deliver ‘green outsourcing’, are providers doing enough show customers robust evidence of their green credentials? The answer, according to the 2009 Green Outsourcing Survey from Black Book Research, is a resounding ‘No’.

“The outsourcing industry is saturated with “green speak”, of which the majority is deemed [to be] just hype by user CIOs and vendor sales people,” say the report’s authors. “Both vendors and users continue in a stage of confusion about where and when they should invest their time and money.”

One metric that is starting to play a part in discussions between providers and prospective customers is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). First proposed by The Green Grid, an industry forum of IT vendors and end-user customers, back in 2007, PUE is today a widely accepted form of measuring data-centre efficiency. In April 2010, it was announced that government agencies in the US, Europe and Japan are all planning to adopt and use PUE.

A PUE calculation analyses the relationship between ‘Total Facility Power’ (TFP) and ‘IT Equipment Power’ (IEP). By dividing TFP (the energy consumed by power components, cooling elements and other infrastructure such as lighting) by IEP (the energy that powers servers, storage devices and networking equipment), IT teams arrive at their facility’s PUE score. A PUE score of 3, for example, indicates that data centre energy consumption is three times greater than the energy necessary to power its IT equipment. Ideally, PUE should be less than 2 to 1; the closer to 1 to 1, the better.

PUE is a useful benchmarking tool for measuring and monitoring efficiency improvements in an individual facility, says Andy Hayes, sales manager at Keysource, a company that designs and builds new, energy-efficient data centres and improves existing ones to optimise their energy consumption. Energy assessments, based on calculating PUE, have played an increasingly important part in engagements in recent years, he says, as the cost of electricity has risen. In a recent project for Yorkshire Water, for example, Keysource calculated the PUE score for the company’s facility to be 2.3. In other words, only 43 percent of the total facility power was being used to power IT equipment. After incorporating Keysource’s recommendations for better cooling and airflow management, the PUE score had improved to 1.7 - meaning that 59 percent of TFP is now consumed by IT. That improvement in PUE score also resulted in a potential annual saving of up to £70,000 per year.

But PUE is far from ideal as a means for outsourcing customers to compare one data centre facility to another, says Daniel Lowe, managing director of managed hosting company UKSolutions. “A highly available infrastructure is typically going to have a poorer PUE because of the overheads involved in building in resilience, but that supplier may offer better uptime guarantees to its customers,” he argues. That’s not to say that UKSOlutions isn’t interested in making its facilities as energy-efficient as possible - the company has already done much work on cold-aisle containment, using blanking panels to fill gaps between machines, and repositioning cables to keep them cool, he says. But he just doesn’t see PUE scores as an effective way for the company to market itself as ‘green’.

Perhaps a more blended approach is needed? Glenn Fitzgerald, lead architect and data centre expert at Fujitsu, certainly thinks so. Fitzgerald was a key figure in the development, design and building of a new Fujitsu data centre, London North, which opened in 2008 in Stevenage. Its PUE rating is 1.6 when fully loaded compared, but it is also the first in Europe to be independently certified to the Uptime Institute’s international Tier III standard, which measures availability as well. “Resilience and energy efficiency are equally important dimensions of data-centre quality for our customers, which is why we ensure we can provide good measurements in both areas,” says Fitzgerald. Once London North reaches its full capacity, he says, Fujitsu is planning a new data centre that uses wind and wave power alongside National Grid power.

Even representatives of the Green Grid advise against relying on PUE as a means to compare the efficiency of one data-centre facililty against that of another. “It’s a relational metric,” explains Vic Smith, chairman of the Green Grid’s EMEA Technical Working Group. “It provides a way for companies to measure their own progress in using energy more efficiently, to map their journey between a PUE of X to a PUE of Y, but not to compare facilities. That’s not how it was ever intended to be used.”

Sourcingfocus.com’s advice to would-be outsourcing clients? Ask your IT outsourcing provider about what PUE score they achieve in their data centre facilities - it can’t hurt and it will show them that you’re in touch with Green IT issues. Ask them what measures they’ve taken to improve their score and the results they’ve seen as a result.

But also ask them for stats on reliability and availability, too. After all, few companies are so environmentally-friendly that they’re ready to sacrifice the resilience of vital business processes on the altar of meeting carbon reduction targets.

Thirty-six data centre decision makers and influencers attended our industry event at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead as part of the Keysource 2010 data centre seminar programme. Attendees were given an interesting insight into our award winning efficient data centre designs, with expert speakers presenting informative case studies detailing projects designed and built over the last 18 months.

The audience, made up of senior management professionals from both the private and public sector, received useful guidance on energy efficiency strategies and how best to reduce power consumption whilst supporting high density IT loads with high levels of resilience.

Overall the seminar was a great success and generated some lively discussions. Our next event will take place at the PGS site in Weybridge, Surrey on Wednesday 9th June, where attendees will receive an all-access tour and demonstration of the UK’s leading data centre.

Keysource has been shortlisted for a Green IT Award for the data centre designed and built for Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) in Weybridge, Surrey.

Keysource is one of five companies nominated in the category of Environmental Project of the Year Private Sector Under 100 employees, with the winner to be announced at an awards ceremony on the April 22nd at London Zoo.

The awards are organised by Green IT Magazine and are designed to reward the outstanding environmental products, suppliers and projects of 2009, as well as highlight companies and teams that have made a significant contribution to improving the IT industry’s environmental performance.

The PGS data centre facility is one of UK’s most efficient data centres, with a PUE of less than 1.2 compared to a typical UK figure for a conventionally designed data centre of 2.2. It has already scooped a host of awards in the past 12 months including a Data Centre Leaders Award, Information Age Award and UK IT Industry Award.

Original article was published on the Times Online and can be found at  http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article7022488.ece#comment-have-your-say.

Outside, the temperature is a bone-chilling minus 14C and Helsinki is struggling with its iciest winter since 1982, but deep inside a former bomb shelter carved from the bedrock beneath an Orthodox cathedral, the city’s power company is building what will soon be the world’s most high-tech municipal heating system.

Here, surplus heat from hundreds of computer servers in a new data centre located beneath Uspenski Cathedral, one of the city’s main tourist attractions, will be captured and pumped to heat hundreds of homes and businesses across the Finnish capital.

“This will be the greenest and most energy-efficient data centre in the world,” Juha Sipila, the project manager for Helsingin Energia, the company behind the scheme, said.  In Helsinki, where winter temperatures often plunge to minus 30C, hardly anyone owns a domestic heating boiler. Instead, water is heated centrally at combined heat and power (CHP) plants to 115C and piped directly to tens of thousands of homes and public buildings.

Helsingin Energia is the operator of Helsinki's district heating network, a 1,350km (850-mile) network of underground pipes, tunnels and pumping stations that supplies hot water to 450,000 people across one of the world’s coldest capital cities. The data centre will be cooled using seawater from the Baltic, which falls below 8C from November to May, with the excess heat pumped back into the city’s heating system — a solution that Mr Sipila hopes will help to crack a pressing problem for the world’s IT industry.

Data centres consume vast amounts of energy — about 3 per cent of all the electricity generated in Britain, for example. About two-thirds of the total is used simply for cooling. That figure is growing steadily with the brisk expansion of so-called cloud computing, whereby the internet is evolving into a central store for data and processing for millions of businesses around the world. Global emissions of carbon dioxide from data centres are now equivalent to about a third of the total from aviation and are rising by 10 per cent per year.

“For technology companies like Google and IBM, this is a very big issue,” Matti Roto, of Academica, a Finnish IT firm involved in the project, said. “The cost of paying for all that energy is huge — quite apart from the emissions — so it is very important to find solutions to improve efficiency.” Only about 40 per cent of the energy consumed by a typical data centre is used for computing, Mr Roto said, with the rest needed simply to cool down the computers. This centre’s power usage effectiveness — the central measurement of data centre efficiency — will be an unprecedented figure of less than one. The lowest figure for other centres has been 1.5.

The Academica server centre due to enter service in April is a pilot and will supply enough hot water to heat 1,000 flats. Mr Roto has plans for a much bigger scheme including 2,000 square metres of server racks.  He believes that Nordic countries may have stumbled across a lucrative new business opportunity to tap into the growing £7 billion global server market. A similar project is under way in Iceland, which will use geothermal energy to power servers and cold seawater for cooling. Google has also announced plans recently to site a giant server centre in Finland.

Keysource says: Hats off to Helsingin Energia - It is a positive sign that more and more global businesses are recognising the impact that data centres are having on the environment. 

Keysource have been proactive in the recovery of waste energy from the data centre to try and provide a level of heating to neighboring communities. So far it has been largely unsuccessful due to the difficulties in transporting the vast quantities of low grade heat produced by a large data centre over any distance. It would certainly be interesting to discover exactly how Helsingin Energia is overcoming this obstacle.

In consideration to the savings made and the PUE achievable, UK data centre design and build company Keysource have already built a data centre in the UK, which has been operational for 12 months with an annualised PUE 1.17. This has achieved a 6.7 million kWh reduction in annual power consumption and 2.9 million kg reduction in annual CO2 emissions in its first year. Click  www.keysource.co.uk/successstories/index.aspx?id=813 for more details.

Yorkshire Water was looking to gain a greater understanding of the performance of its data centre facility and associated operating costs to enable the company to manage its IT infrastructure more closely and more responsibly.

Yorkshire Water appointed Keysource to conduct an Energy Assessment to provide a review of its data centre’s energy use and see how the company could reduce overall operating costs and the environmental impact of the facility. Following the survey and recommendation report from Keysource, Yorkshire Water implemented a number of suggested changes which resulted in a reduction in energy consumption of more than 25 per cent with a potential annual saving of up to £70,000.  

Shakil Azam, IT Service Provisions & Data Centre Manager commented: “Keysource’s Energy Assessments and recommendations proved essential for our ongoing commitment to reducing energy consumption from our IT infrastructure. By working closely with Keysource, we have tapped into their extensive data centre knowledge and expertise, to achieve significant performance gains in terms of reduced costs and carbon emissions.”

Click Yorkshire Water Data Centre Assessement to read the full case study.

Keysource says; Our innovative approaches to data centre efficiency and measurement has set new standards in terms of the savings and PUE that are achievable. The Yorkshire Water project demonstrates that measurement followed by implementing best practice recommendations can prove very attractive indeed when the power savings available are assessed.

Can we tender for your new data centre design and build project? Could your facility benefit from an energy efficiency assessment? Please get in touch…

In a recent article titled “Three experts offer advice on how to achieve data centre energy efficiency”, Dean Nelson from eBay and Rob Aldrich from Cisco discuss moving your initiative to the next level.

Moving beyond small incremental improvements requires both organisational and technological change. Whether it involves retrofitting an existing data centre or building a new one, going green requires a fundamental shift in corporate governance.

Dean Nelson, senior director of global data centre services at eBay, says this involves two things. "You need executive alignment from the CEO on down, and you need a leader: someone with both budget and operational authority who's passionate about the initiative and responsible for its success."

The best place to start selling a green data centre is often the CFO's office, says Rob Aldrich, senior manager and principal for Cisco's efficiency assurance programme. "Go to someone who sees the bills for both IT and power, and work out a split in the savings. Work it so IT gets to use half the savings to reduce its top line and the facilities group gets the other half off their bottom line. By doing this you can in turn finance a sustainable sustainability program."

Read the full article here (http://www.tele-management.ca/content/23241-three_experts_offer_advice_on_how_to_achieve_data_centre_energy_efficiency)

Keysource says; The IT infrastructure underpins the operation of any company, so a data centre touches on all areas of an organisation. With energy efficiency and environmental impact being pushed up the business agenda, it is important to engage in open dialogue with all critical stakeholders to better understand key business drivers, educate about the role of data centres and secure the buy-in for necessary change.

For the successful implementation of an effective data centre strategy, it is important to communicate across multiple areas of the business and work with as many key decision makers as possible including CEO, CFO, COO, IT Director and FM Director. Our experience has shown us that it is possible for an informed and sensitive supplier to support a company throughout this process and deliver much more effective solutions as a result, even winning awards for it.

Keysource has extended its award-winning Ecofris approach  to data centre cooling with the launch of a solution designed for smaller facilities, colocation centres and multi-roomed sites.

Keysource has developed a new 125kW mechanical cooling system, complementing the existing 600kW module, to satisfy the cooling demands of new and existing data centres of any size. As a result, private and public sector organisations can drive down the energy cost of operating data centres by more than 45 per cent whatever their IT needs.

By creating a scalable solution, Ecofris can now meet the demands of a wider range of data centre requirements. Not only does the new cooling module make it possible to significantly reduce running costs and carbon footprint for lower capacity data centres, it offers greater flexibility for refurbishment projects where space may prevent the use of the larger solution. Furthermore, the system is ideal for colocation centres or public sector multi-roomed sites where a greater number of smaller modules may be required.

Mike West, Managing Director of Keysource says: “When we devised the Ecofris philosophy to energy efficient data centre cooling, it was always our intention to develop a scalable approach to meet the needs of any type of facility. With a mix of clever thinking and precision engineering we have been able to create a smaller scale unit at the centre of the mechanical cooling system, and we have already secured two new clients from the education and co-lo sectors.”

Original article was published by Pete Swabey and can be found at Green IT Innovation Award

“The greatest enabler for efficiency in the data centre is airflow management,” says James Cole, a director at data centre design and management provider Keysource, whose energy-efficient data centre deployment for oil exploration company PGS won it the Green IT Innovation award.

The PGS site has achieved an annual average power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio – a measure of how much power pumped into a data centre facility ends up supporting actual IT workloads – of 1.19. Cole says that has been recognised by the team behind the European Union’s Data Centre Code of Conduct programme as the lowest of any data centre in Europe.

To achieve that PUE ratio, Keysource uses its own approach to data centre efficiency, named EcoFris, which manipulates airflow to minimise the requirement for artificial cooling in two ways.

First of these, says Cole, is the “complete separation of the exhaust air [hot air coming out of the IT equipment] from the conditioned air coming into the space”. Making sure that these never mix ensures that any energy used to cool air results in as much cooling of actual equipment as possible.

The second component of EcoFris is “optimising external plant to [make the best use of] ambient temperatures external to the data centre without introducing fresh air,” explains Cole. “Fresh air introduces complications in its own right, such as contaminants and humidity. Plus, with a fresh air solution you need to have a full-sized cooling capability when the fresh air can no longer be used.”

The EcoFris solution uses the external temperature to cool two high-efficiency water coils, which in turn cool air inside the facility. This air is pumped into the data centre space in proportion to the amount of exhaust air produced by the IT equipment, which is constantly monitored at over 2,500 points within the facility.

When the temperature rises above a certain level it is necessary to switch on a supplementary cooling device, which sprays cold water on the high-efficiency coils. In 2009, it was only necessary to switch on the mechanical cooling for a total of 60 hours. “This explains why we have a PUE of 1.19,” Cole says.

PGS is now preparing to triple the IT workload in the data centre, and Cole anticipates that the PUE will stay the same.

This award brings Keysource’s award total for 2009 to three after earlier winning entries in the ‘Environmental Project of the Year’ category at the 2009 UK IT Industry Awards and PGS data centre, designed and built by Keysource won the ‘Innovation in the medium data centre’ at the 2009 Datacenter Dynamics Leaders Awards.

Data centre and IT managers could benefit from a new free online tool from The Green Grid, which has been designed to help lower costs and improve the energy efficiency of their facilities.

The tool, which has been made available in Europe for the first time, allows Data Centre Managers to work out how much outside air is available to cool individual facilities. Users simply input variables such as local energy costs, IT load and facility load to calculate the energy savings for their specific data centres, as well as savings that could be obtained using water-side economisers, according to The Green Grid.

Green Grid members also gain access to a high-resolution map of the estimated hours of air-side and water-side economisation possible for Europe and many specific countries.

"Data centres with increasing IT loads require more power to cool them, so finding cooling options that use less power is critical not only for organisations that do not have resources to build new facilities, but for those that want to save money," said Vic Smith, Dell representative and EMEA technical work group chairman of The Green Grid.

"For much of the year, the air outside datacentres can be cooler than the air inside. This tool that The Green Grid has developed will help determine how much free cooling a specific datacentre can leverage."

Source: BCS

Social networking site Facebook is attempting to increase the energy efficiency of its servers.

Engineers from the website revealed plans earlier this week to remove uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) and power distribution units (PDUs) from its data centres to lower its overall energy wastage.

Facebook is instead planning on using a power distribution method invented by Google.

This method involves replacing the UPSs and PDUs with a single 12-volt battery for each server's power supply.

James Cole, director of data centre designers Keysource, said that this move was becoming increasingly popular as 'the UPS normally contributes to around five to ten per cent of the energy wastage of a data centre'.

He added: 'Technology is helping to drive the efficiency of the things which cool the data centre, which is where the greatest amount of wastage occurs. So cooling technologies which utilise ambient temperatures outside the data centre, technologies which draw fresh air into the data centre, are all sort of at the nub of the technology.'

The move was unveiled by Facebook engineer Amir Michael at a lecture in California earlier this month.

Mr Michael was previously employed at the Google data centre which developed the technology.

Source: IT Hotdesk

Cutting-edge technology is helping data centre facilities reduce the amount of energy they use, according to an IT industry expert.

James Cole, director of Keysource, explained that technological developments are currently focused on cooling data centres as this is where most energy wastage occurs.

"So cooling technologies which utilise ambient temperatures outside the data centre, technologies which draw fresh air into the data centre, are all sort of at the nub of the technology," he commented.

James went on to stress that the power usage effectiveness ratio – which is used to measure the energy efficiency of a data centre - can be manipulated by companies trying to show that their servers are 'green'. He added that firms should keep in mind the bigger picture of improving the overall efficiency of their data centres.

Earlier this month, Facebook engineer Amir Michael gave a technology lecture in Palo Alto, California, in which he explained that the company hopes to hopes to cut energy loss in its data centres from 35 to 15 per cent.
 

Source: Lockerbie data centre given green light - BBC 
 

Lockerbie Data Centres lodged a masterplan for its proposals earlier this year.

A council has given the green light to a multi-million pound data centre plan for the south of Scotland.  Lockerbie Data Centres (LDC) wants to build the development at Peelhouses Farm in Dumfries and Galloway, claiming it could create thousands of jobs.

Dumfries and Galloway Council planning officers had recommended the project be approved with a list of conditions.  LDC said it hoped to start work next year on what would be one of the biggest data centres in the world. The proposal was approved by DGC's Annandale and Eskdale area committee. Plans for 750 houses associated with the development were dropped.

LDC project director, David King, said he was delighted the scheme had been given the go-ahead. He added: "This is a major enterprise programme that will be of considerable benefit, not only to Dumfries and Galloway, but to the whole of Scotland, creating thousands of jobs. Feedback from the local community has been extremely positive and this development will put Dumfries and Galloway firmly on the map as world leaders in data centre provision."

Keysource says:  Combined heat and power, as well as localised gas production, could be used as renewable sources of energy at the site. The heat which will be generated by the centre's IT equipment could potentially be used as an eco-friendly source of energy.  

Green data strategies should be utilised in the UK's data centres, it has been asserted.

James Cole, director of infrastructure organisation Keysource, made his remarks after it was widely reported that Dumfries and Galloway planning officials have given their authorisation for the biggest data centre in the UK.

Set to take the form of a 250,000 sq m data storage facility, the site will be partially powered by renewable energy sources.

Mr Cole said that as renewable energy sources become increasingly commonplace, data centres could provide the perfect platform for their utilisation.

Data centres "should be their first port of call to utilise this", he added.

However, Mr Cole explained that reliability is a key factor that needs to be taken into consideration, as "uptime power" is still very much a "prominent driver" for such facilities.

"If it's going into the data centre and it's unreliable, then maybe that power should be used elsewhere," he concluded, suggesting that a debate about renewable power should take place alongside one regarding data efficiency. Source: QAS - Nov 25 2009, 10:00 AM.

The Green Grid, which Keysource has been a Green Grid Member of since March 2007, has launched a short guide to policies affecting the data centre industry in EMEA.  The guide, which provides organisations with everything they need to know about current and forthcoming policies.

As climate change and fuel security have significantly moved up in the policy agenda, more comprehensive policy frameworks have been developed at both the European Union (EU) and national levels. The growth of data centres, and their energy intensity, means the industry will be particularly affected by the drive for energy efficiency of product design and building services.  In fact, this is one of the key highlights expected to result from the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December this year. However, with the rising number and complexity of these frameworks, organisations may be unsure about the implications of the legislations, their responsibilities and how they should achieve this.

In order to help organisations achieve this, The Green Grid has created “The Green Grid Energy Policy Research For Data Centres,” a guide to existing and emerging energy policies affecting the data centre industry in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.  The report provides a summary of existing and forthcoming legislation, incentives and voluntary initiatives, along with practical steps for improvement and achievement.

“The overall finding from the report is that legislation is continuously tightening, and therefore it is advisable to innovate now and seek out opportunities to manage future implications for all data centres across the region,” said Vic Smith, Dell representative and EMEA Technical Work Group chair of The Green Grid.

The report highlights the most significant policies to affect organisations.  

Those that resulted as the most significant are:

• Revisions to Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) – The previous EPBD has had minor implications to date.  However the revisions will include new buildings to be zero energy by the end of 2018, a definition of zero-energy buildings to be established by the end of 2010, and Member States to set minimum percentages for a share of existing buildings to be energy neutral in 2015 and 2020.

The guide also makes recommendations for how to best achieve these and prepare for future initiatives, such as:

• All stakeholders should prepare for and manage risks associated with the (UK) Carbon Reduction Commitment.

To read the guide in full, please go to www.thegreengrid.org or call Keysource on 0845 204 3333 for further information.

US company VMWare has just launched an interesting new data centre in Washington State to consolidate its many smaller data centre and computer roon facilities. One of the things that interests me most is that not only is it an energy efficicent data centre with an implied PUE of 1-2 - 1.5, it recycles the wast heat from the servers to heat the offcie space. This gives it a double whammy which provides an energy saving of $5m a year on its 61,000 sq ft of space.

Interestingly, the next best pricing model was a coal-fired data centre in Oklahoma, which VMWare "shuddered at"....

Ian Bitterlin posted about his recent visit to PGS’ data centre; designed, built and managed by Keysource. Please find below the post of Ian’s blog for Datacenter Dynamics

'I was pleased to get invited to see PGSs data-centre near Brooklands by Keysource. OK they were trying to sell me something but I am a sucker for a good sales pitch. However, sales pitch aside, what I found I really liked, both technically and environmentally. They really have achieved 1.2 without having fresh-air in the room, with UPS and without the facility being full. Clearly there are some hurdles to wholesale acceptance - but as far as I am able to judge few of those are a show-stopper if ALL you want is a low PUE. The solution (ecofris) needs a bit more Capex over a conventional chilled water solution with free-cooling and a bit more space - but I tend to believe that the RoI is less than than the 18 months that is claimed. The space issue isnt a big problem (no pun intended) but is more one of where the footprint is needed. If you get the chance go see it. If, like me, you are a little sceptical on the PUE then be prepared to be convinced. The actual installation in PGS has some site and customer specific limitations but it looked to me like the 'ideal' version of this technology could be even better that what you get to see. Certainly not for everyone or every type of client and definitely hampered by the 'no-one ever got fired for buying IBM' syndrome but a practical, non-rocket science, way of getting greener. Hats off. PS Brooklands museum and a stroll on the banked track is worth the trip all on its own!'

‘Data centre builder Ark Continuity is building a data centre which it promises will ultimately use underground stone mines and nuclear bunkers to set efficiency records for shared data centres reports E WEEK EUROPE.

The first phase of the data centre in Spring Park, Corsham, Wiltshire, will open in November 2009, with a modular structure that gives users their own space in a sustainable data centre which will have a PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.5 - compared to a national average of 2.2. Following that, further phases will use Victorian stone mines and Cold War bunkers below the site with undergound cooling, to go even further, according to Dr Phillip ("Pip") Squire, project and engineering director of Ark Continuity.

"The next stage of development will prove to be one of the most energy- efficient data facilities in the world – achieving a PUE of under 1.2 without introducing fresh-air into the data rooms," said Dr Squire'.

Keysource says: It is a positive sign that more and more global businesses are recognising the impact that data centres are having on the environment. However, this commitment by T-Systems and Intel just goes to show how far behind many companies are when compared with best practise within the data centre sector. These two organsiations plan to make a multi-million dollar investment to achieve efficiency levels that still fall short of industry leading solutions that are already operational today.

The Ecofris solution at PGS is achieving a PUE of 1.2, resulting in a reduction in annual power consumption of 15.8 million kW-h, when operating at full IT load and compared to the company’s previous facility. This equates to a saving of 6.8 million kilograms of CO2 each year (based on UK grid average).

The findings of research among 100 senior UK IT professionals being publicised by Sentrum  seems to confirm the results of similar research undertaken by Keysource last year among around a 100 its customers. Keysource found that average UK PUE among small to medium-sized data centres was 2.5. This is far from ideal in an environment where the forthcoming Carbon Reduction Commitment legislation will create new pressure to reduce carbon footprints.

Keysource have found that its Ecofris approach to data centre design and installation can reduce the carbon footprint of a typical UK data centre installation by 45% and more in the case of many ‘legacy’ centres. The payback for this can be within two years as the introduction of Keysource’s unique cooling solution comes with the added benefit of increased data centre capacity. A core element in ensuring the savings in a short time-frame is the monitoring and maintenance of the installation. Keysource is about to complete its first twelve months of monitoring a PUE of 1.2 which has been achieved on an annualised basis with Ecofris technology. Keysource found that more than 200 senior UK IT professionals expressed an interest in reducing data centre running costs and cutting carbon emissions. However, an equal number did not express this commitment – mostly due to there being no current opportunity to change their data centre environment.

The world's data centres are producing more carbon emissions than countries and must be more efficient warned Samsung at a recent press conference. Jim Elliott, vice president of Memory Marketing at Samsung said that worldwide carbon emissions were currently more than the carbon footprint of The Netherlands and Argentina based on current data from the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Data centres are producing more CO2 than countries,” said Jim Elliot, vice president of Memory Marketing at Samsung. He said that the two big energy saving technologies were solid state drives and DDR3 memory, since they used less power and enabled more efficient servers.  

Original Source: PC Authority

The Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) is a mandatory emissions trading scheme starting in April 2010.

Around 20,000 organisations will be affected by the new regulation and these organisations will have to purchase carbon allowances from the Government from April 2011 – which could cost tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds depending on their emissions.

Keysource says: Many organisations have not yet considered the financial, compliance, audit and carbon management implications of the new regulations especially for their data centres.
A guide released by the Carbon Trust Standard has been designed to bring you up to speed on how the CRC could affect your organisation.

Feedback from our data centre seminars suggest that more companies are now tracking and reporting their data centre efficiency using the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric devised by the Green Grid.

Recently the Green Grid has updated and outlined three levels of PUE measurement, based on the particulars of where and when measurements are taken. The Basic, Intermediate and Advanced PUE ratings are defined by where the IT equipment power and total facility power measurements are taken, and how often the data is collected.

Although data centre efficiency measurement metrics such as PUE have helped emphasise the importance of reducing energy consumption in the data centre, the figures collected should not be used to compare one facility to another, states Vic Smith, EMEA data centre strategist at Dell, and a senior member of the Green Grid. Comparing PUEs between data centres could be misleading because PUE is purely a "relational metric" and is "not meant to be used as a comparison between data centres".

Keysource says: The PUE metric has created a universal reference point that makes it possible for data centre operators to start making important assessments of their facilities, and help them make informed strategies for reducing energy usage moving forward.

A recently released report from Brocade about Green IT is interesting. It states that if ‘IT doesn't pay the electric bill, the data centre won't get greened’. The report surveyed more than 1,000 senior IT decision makers in North America, Western Europe, the Nordic region, Turkey, and Dubai. It found that in 50% of all enterprises surveyed, facilities management paid the electricity bill. In only 23% of enterprises does the IT department foot the bill the entire bill. In 22% of the cases IT and facilities share the costs, and in 5% of companies, a different department pays. The report also found that only 51% of IT departments surveyed have a system in place for measuring how much power hardware uses.  

Keysource says; If the IT department were responsible for paying its own power bills, you would soon see monitoring systems being put into place to measure efficiency. If they had to deal with power price increases, electrical use would soon go down and if IT were allowed to keep a portion of these savings on electricity, this could always be applied to other IT projects. Visit our dedicated data centre efficiency website for more information on monitoring and saving money

Plans for a 250 acre internet server farm in Scotland are advancing, after the scheme received £600m investment, reports the Guardian.

A British company has raised £600m towards its plans to build what could become the world's largest data centre in Scotland. By providing around 3 million square feet of server space, Alba 1 could dwarf the world's largest existing data centres if it opens in 2010 as planned. It also said to please environmental campaigners as these are set to be, by and large, green projects as it is due to run off power generated at nearby biomass plant and from local wind farms. Other planned facilities could draw on a tidal power generation centre in the Pentland Firth, off the northern tip of the Scottish mainland.

Keysource says; Although this data centre will benefit from the lower ambient temperatures in Scotland, a major obstacle might be sourcing power. Power allocation in data centers is becoming an increasing problem these days with rising oil prices and increasing power costs. As times are changing, costs of cooling and supplying power make it necessary to implement firm strategies regarding the distribution of power throughout the data centre.

How about use Niagra Falls as a carbon free energy source? Read more about this amazing source of free energy with no carbon emissions here. Yahoo is planning on building its next mega data centre next to Niagra Falls to tap into the unlimited resource of carbon free energy. This is yet another, albeit unusual, example of forward thinking companies seeking innovative ways of reducing energy consumption.  They are predicting that they will save over $100m over a ten year period on their energy bill.
 

Keysource says; energy reduction is something we at Keysource are passionate about, not least because we believe we are amongst the world leaders in reducing energy consumption in data centres. We also believe, this is going to become THE overwhelming commercial driver in the next few years for any business with a signicficant spend on energy for their business. Oil prices are going in one direction only in the medium to long term, and even in this downturn they are still currently in excess of $70 per barrel. forward thinking companies need to be thinking about how this is going to affect their business and their competitiveness. Coupled with the Carbon limits being imposed on many organisations from next year, reducing energy consumption should be seen as a SMART decision from any commercial point of view.

No, well not all of Keysource anyway, just our intrepid leader Mike West aboard the racing yacht "Keysource" that we are sponsoring this season to help highlight our campaign for greater energy efficiency. You can follow Mike's progress on "Keysource" on his way to the Azores by following this interactive map. 


 
Mike and his crew have put in a fantastic performance and have started the race in fine form having won the prologue of the race. View some of the images of the race here. 

Mike West, Managing Director for Keysource gave an interview to E Week in June which is summarised below. Want to challenge Mike’s views? Please comment below.

The Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) data centre  in Surrey appears to be the first in Europe to have a Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) score of 1.2. PUE is the amount of energy put into the system divided by the amount that reaches the servers - and most of today's data centres have a score greater than two, which means less than half the power input reaches the IT kit.

That's a feather in the cap for Keysource, the company that built the PGS centre but it's important not to oversimplify the discussion, said Mike West, Keysource's Managing Director. A data centre's PUE depends a lot on the outside temperature, and should be quoted as an annual figure, based on a year's figures for temperature fluctuations. "The important factor is the annualised PUE in kwH," said West. "Air conditioning is where the biggest gains can be made. Losses from UPS inefficiencies, and standby power, are all linear and predictable, but data centre cooling is the area of biggest opportunity." Because cooling depends on outside temperatures and other factors, it's the one where extra work can get the biggest gains. "Nuances around the specialist mechanical and electrical plant can have a dramatic effect on the outcome of the facility from an efficiency and performance point of view," he said.

"The biggest issue is the high density hardware," West said. Blades can pack more processing power in a smaller space, but that raises the amount of heat that needs to be dissipated. The PGS data centre has around 16kW per rack position.  The only way to get a low PUE is to cut down the amount of active cooling that needs to be done, and use "free cooling". Instead of turning on mechanical chillers that burn power and push the PUE up. PGS only needs to turn on chillers when the ambient temperature is above 24C. Most free cooling systems so far have needed a temperature of five degrees - so they can only be used for maybe 1000 hours a year. Keysource does better by raising the input temperature: "According to our climate models, we would only need chillers on for 87 hours in a typical year," said West. That's partly helped by location: "our climate in this country is ideal for free cooling in data centres."

Why not fresh air?

In theory "fresh air cooling" for data centres might take the PUE down further, by just flushing the building with air from outside, and doing away with the need for heat exchangers. "You still have to have fans to move the air," he said, but there would also be a heavy expense in continually filtering the air, with high quality filters that would need changing regularly. Also, there would be the expense of warming the air and humidifying it, to keep the constant levels that servers like. Instead, Keysource prefers the standard closed loop system with heat exchangers. "We were satisfied that our cooling system is as efficient as a fresh air system - and has no contamination to deal with."

In the PGS data centre, air is provided at 22C, which is well within the specifications of the servers, he said. That's two degrees higher than the 20C which has become traditional, but not a big change, he said. Every degree the input temperature is raised increases the number of hours where no chilling is needed for the centre. The main issue is keeping the "hot aisle" between the backs of the servers strictly separate from the "cold aisle" outside the server racks, he said. "The only way cold air can get back to the server is by getting heated up. It is ducted to the ceiling and back to the heat exchanger." Meanwhile, the cold air is supplied underneath a raised floor, and blown in through the wall, at the full height of the room, he said - so the cold aisle is effectively the whole server room, apart from the hot aisles between the server backs. While the temperature at the processors can up to 100C or 150C, the hot aisle only gets up to around 32C, he said.

To read the original article, published By Peter Judge at E Week on Europe 8th June 2009, please click ‘Data Centre Cooling - It's Not Rocket Science’

Welcome to the Keysource Data Centre blog. We intend making this a useful and insighful resource for the whole data centre community. We have some of the best people in the industry working for us at Keysource and we want to share our knoweldge and thoughts. Sometimes we will be expanding upon existing themes and knowledge and at other times we will provoke debate on the best ways of achieving business objectives in data centres.

We hope you will find this useful and we welcome your thoughs and comments on the industry. Please DO feel free to challenge us and provide alternative views, it can only make us a stronger industry.