Building Green, Energy Efficient Data Centres for Sustainable Business

Robert Tozer (EYP, an HP company providing services over optimizing data centres) talks about data centre strategy, but with some bias toward the UK.

The presentation starts with some facts and figures over energy consumption and carbon emissions. The largest losses on energy are on the generation, then the cooling and third the idle systems.

The DC reliability is not affected by efficiency initiatives, partly because the UPS units are not the most critical energy wasters.

On a sample of 15 assessments done by EYP, the PUE (power usage efficiency) sorts out as very different from one data centre to another, from 1.8 to 3.5 and more (the average is 2.2, normal for legacy data centres). EYP claims it can reach 1.2 on new installations.

Robert presents a description of a typical assessment, with 2 scenarios (quick wins and not so quick).

Key strategy points:

• Air management (in the DC, the cabinet, the server);
• Mechanical (e.g. free cooling)
• Electrical
• IT equipment

Analyzing all the parts and pieces consuming energy and describing where optimization can be done, in a scientific manner.

The presentation goes in deep details about what can be done (for example: 3 different ways of separating cold and warm aisles).

Since chips run at about 80° (higher than any temperature on the globe), cooling should not be necessary. HP is trying to act on this idea.

The presentation went into deep details about the assessment and the possible optimization. It is probably very interesting for the people directly involved in this domain.