New data center in Texas wins green certification
GEORGETOWN, Texas — Jim Carney, executive vice president of data center planning for Citigroup, likes to describe the company’s newest compute facilities as “24/7 by forever.”
Inside a green data center
In data center life, that “forever” translates to a good 20 to 30 years — at least for this New York-based global financial giant.
“We’ve succeeded in developing a very flexible platform that can adapt easily and seamlessly to changes in customer technologies and allow for differences in heat densities, power consumption and physical layout without causing severe interruptions to their service requirements,” Carney says.
Jack Glass, executive vice president of critical systems engineering, says he likes to tell Citi clients this about the company’s new data centers: “We can do anything anywhere but we can’t do anything everywhere.”
If a Citi business unit wants blade servers here and a grid there, the company’s modern data center infrastructure can handle each request, Glass says. “That’s how flexible it is. We can allocate that capacity and have high-density areas and low-density areas — our hands aren’t tied in the data center space,” he adds.
Global view
That wasn’t always the case. Five years ago, Citi faced a number of challenges relative to its aging data center infrastructure. Capacity was exhausted, flexibility limited and “proximity risk” too high because, at the time, Citi had concentrated most of its processing in major metropolitan hubs such as London and New York.
Out of those challenges arose a cohesive, global data center strategy. “What we had been doing was incremental and now it was time to take a big step,” Glass says.
The plan calls for Citi to reduce the number of data centers worldwide from 52 to 14 strategic sites, including five constructed from the ground up. The latest of its new North American data centers, in Georgetown, Texas, went online in January.
Citi, not unlike many companies, faces an interesting dilemma as it undertook this global data center strategy. While it certainly upgraded data centers here and there and expanded others, it hadn’t built a completely new one in North America in 20 or so years, Glass says. In Europe it was 10 years.
But it quickly learned a few essentials, and the Georgetown data center represents the culmination of all the lessons, Carney says.
No. 1, the data center team realized it needed a global standard for data center construction and engineering. “We’re not dictating to the Nth degree all of the components but putting in place criteria for reliability, maintainability and redundancy,” he says.
And two, teamwork matters. Carney’s data center team provided the engineering perspective and the corporate real-estate representatives lent the construction expertise to the projects, he says. “We brought together the same team throughout the strategy … so we could build upon each project and apply the best practices and lessons learned as we went along.”
“With Georgetown being the last of major construction projects we did it’s where we’re really running on all cylinders,” Carney says.
LEEDing the way
The effort paid off. Citi’s Georgetown facility is the first newly constructed data center to receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).
And it did so with little modification to the original data center plans, which predated the current overall business emphasis on green and LEED certification, Glass says. “Certification pays for itself in some period of time and it plays right into Citigroup’s corporate commitment to reduce its carbon footprint,” he adds.
Citigroup worked with HP Critical Facilities Services, delivered by EYP MCF, to design the LEED-certified data center. In an unofficial review, the HP services team says it believes Georgetown also will meet USGBC’s impending data center certification requirements, Glass says.
The 100,000-square-foot of raised floor Georgetown data center delivers 75 watts per square foot of power, expandable to 100W/square foot. Citi has divided the data center into four equally sized rooms. This setup reduces the amount of cabling needed and allows Citi to group technologies by room based on cooling requirements.
Compared with the previous newly constructed data center, the Georgetown site uses 800 kilowatts less power for the same footprint, for a 30% reduction in energy costs, the company reports.
The Georgetown center primarily supports Citi’s consumer businesses. The branch operation comprises a mainframe infrastructure, an extensive storage network and a tape backup environment, Carney says.
The data center also houses a large number of Unix servers hosting human resources, purchasing and other major corporate applications. Other applications run on a distributed Wintel server environment, he adds.
After much planning and many dress rehearsals, Citi began moving the branch operation to the Georgetown data center “critical application by critical application.” It wrapped up the migration in August, and closed the corresponding, outdated, New York data center at the end of September.
Yardstick for virtualization
Thanks to virtualization, the IT infrastructure is much streamlined compared with legacy centers. Citi uses a 30% to 35% reduction in the number of physical servers as the yardstick for its new data centers, Carney says.
“Last year,” he adds, “was the first time that we didn’t experience any growth in our physical server category because of the amount of reduction we’ve done on technology refreshes through virtualization.”
Glass elaborates: “We have more than 4,000 server virtual instances, and that number replaces many times the number of physical servers. That means anywhere from 12,000 to 20,000 servers weren’t installed or were converted to virtual servers.”
Virtualization also has bent the curve on power consumption for technology on the data center floor, Carney says. In the 2002 to 2007 timeframe, Citi’s data center power consumption grew by 10% to 12% per year, he says. “Last year, as virtualization kicked in and we’ve gone through legacy data center closures, for the first time we’ve been flat on power consumption year over year.”
Schultz is an IT writer in Chicago. She can be reached at bschultz5824@gmail.com.
