Data center designers share secrets for going green

Rising utility costs from running denser and hotter server and storage gear is forcing IT managers to redesign data centers to be more energy-efficient.

Take the case of Dan Wilson, IT operations manager for Osram Sylvania in Danvers, Mass. Getting an updated electrical bill prompted his data center redesign.

“We were being charged a pro-rated amount that had been determined several years before that no one had ever updated internally when energy costs rose,” Wilson says. “When accounting did upgrade it, we said 'Oh wait, they are hitting us with a real bill now.’ The [amount] came as a shock to us.”

Wilson manages two data centers for the lighting manufacturer – one in Danvers and the other located above a loading dock in a facility in Manchester, N.H. When trucks enter or leave the loading dock, much of the benefit of the air-conditioning in the data center is lost as the doors open and close. Wilson’s 2,000-square-foot data center suffers not only when the overhead doors open but also from the fact that the sun beats down on an exposed wall of the data center and on the roof. Also, when Osram Sylvania designed its data center it put racks of servers parallel to the air conditioning units, thus cutting their effectiveness. “We set up the data center so it looked good,” he says.

In an effort to make its data centers more energy efficient, Osram Sylvania hired Degree Controls to conduct a thermal study, which pinpointed hot spots where excess energy consumption occurred. Wilson installed sensor-based and fan-assisted AdaptivCool floor tiles that monitor the data center for hot spots and then dynamically manage the flow of cooling to racks and exhausts hot air back to the computer room air conditioner (CRAC) intake.

“We have four sensors spread down the row of servers,” he says. “When those sensors determine that we've hit a certain temperature collectively, it will kick in the fan to push more cold air up at the far end of the row.”

Wilson is also reorganizing his primary data center, eliminating half of the nine racks of servers by virtualizing IBM AIX systems. He plans to realign the remaining servers into hot and cold aisles.

The costs of getting it cool

The proper and efficient cooling of data centers has gotten a lot of attention lately from data center designers and other IT professionals. Research firm Gartner predicts that by the end of 2008, nearly half of data centers worldwide will not have sufficient power and cooling to support new high-density server and storage gear. Gartner estimated that in 2005 alone companies spent $6 billion powering data centers in the United States. By 2011, more than a third of data center budgets will be allocated to environmental costs, the market watcher estimates.

Data centers are going green in large part because of rapidly escalating energy costs, but also to be a good "corporate citizens." At 365 Main, a data center builder in San Francisco, designers have taken building green to heart.

In Newark, Calif., 365 Main has built from the ground up the first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified data center in the United States. The facility, which tops out at over 136,000 square feet of floor space, features the use of recycled and locally obtained building materials, computer room air handlers and CRACs that consume 30% less energy than traditional CRAH units, make-up air handlers that use outside ambient air, and energy-efficient lighting and water-efficient landscaping.