Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management, breaks data centre non-ICT power consumption down as 42.5% cooling, 2.5% UPS and 5% miscellaneous. “Generally speaking, there is more to be done in better efficiency and economy on this non-ICT side, not least because it is in many respects all about design and management and these offer opportunities for better performance,” says Vincent Barro, Schneider IT vice-president and country manager for Ireland.
While energy costs have been a concern of managements for a long time, it has in recent years been given a new emphasis. “In many ways driving efficiencies on the infrastructure side is more about decisions than about engineering optimisation as it might be in ICT. It’s all about money at the end of the day and now we see financial directors involved. Neither the facilities management nor the ICT teams would traditionally have been as motivated as today’s top financial officers are,” Barro points out. “For instance most of the cost thinking would have been based on capital budgets while today managements tend to look for — and look critically at — OpEx, definitely includes large monthly electricity bills.”
Data centres are well managed from the energy point of view because that is key to competition. In the industry there is a belief that out there in the ICT wild there is about 10KW consumed for every 1KW we draw and a huge proportion of it is badly and inefficiently used, Maurice Mortell, TelecityGroup
There are significant improvements that can be made, he believes: “Take the example of an average data centre with a PUE [Power Usage Effectiveness] of two points, also the average. We have shown with clients that an investment of about €200,000 can produce a return on investment in 1.5 years and a return of savings in the same period of the order of €150,000.”
But he emphasises that the major energy savings in the future are going to come from data centre design and anticipation of its energy needs over a period of say three to five years. “The big change is in thinking, in developing modular designs that will keep pace with the needs as they grow. But you have to decide all of that and design accordingly up front. The pace of growth may accelerate but the modularity allows for that.”
Air cooled
Barro points to the data centres of giants like Google and Facebook, saying they are in many respects designed and built around the cooling requirement. “We see modern air flow design in buildings and equipment that can save perhaps 30% immediately in cooling costs. Precision cooling systems are positioned as close to the hot points as possible, for example. Server virtualisation and smaller form factors mean that ‘hot rows’ are now prevalent in data centres. There is also, especially in Ireland because of its normal ambient temperatures, free cooling. But that is another example of a decision that must be taken from the design stage and built into the facility design.”
Free cooling is topical at the moment, given added emphasis by the Apple announcement of a giant 166,000 sq. metre data centre development in Athenry which will use 100% renewable energy. Experts reckon this first Apple data centre outside the USA will be in the 25-30MW bracket, which will bring Ireland’s total power draw by data centres to about 250MWs by 2017. According to EirGrid, about half of the load is from dedicated data centres (Microsoft, Google, etc.) while the traditional co-location industry accounts for the balance. Data centres are particularly complementary to utilising wind energy and other intermittent but sustainable resources because they are expert energy management systems. In Apple’s case as in others, the ‘renewable’ status of the energy is assured by international brokerage and supplied through the national grid.
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