Data centres need to be 'green'

Rising electricity costs and escalating power demands are forcing organisations to think differently about how they build data centres.

This is according to KyotoCooling CEO Mees Lodder, who says: “Too little money, too little skills and trying to do the unthinkable; guess what, the old way of doing things, is unthinkable.”

During a week's tour of innovative data centres, Lodder revealed that KyotoCooling has changed the way cooling is done in a data centre. Following four years of research, this year the company rolled out several installations using an adapted heat wheel that requires less power to cool a data centre compared with water chillers.

Lodder says the decision to scrap technology such as water chillers and water treatment plants stems from the organisation's plans to completely change the way data centres have been cooled in the past.

Lodder calls the term 'green' as being simply window washing. He claims that IT, which emits as much carbon emissions into the atmosphere as the aviation industry, in itself will never be green.

“The system needs to be sustainable and to emit as less carbon dioxide emissions as possible. However, a data centre will never be completely 'green'. KyotoCooling is making data centre cooling more efficient and 'green' is only a by-product of that,” he notes.

Hans Shreuders, KyotoCooling business development director, says the company's cooling units aim to achieve an 80% decrease in electricity costs generated from cooling data centres and has set an ambitious goal to lower the national electricity grid demand by up to 30%.

Shreuders claims that the technology in the conventional water-chilled data centres is not as efficient as it should be, as many vendors have taken a more complex strategy of solving cooling problems.

“The biggest problem with water-chilled systems is the risk of a water leak that can immediately destroy IT systems,” he adds.

Another problem, notes Shreuders, is the amount of energy that is wasted to cool servers that are not in use or use less power than other servers.

“Data centres, generally, deliver up to five-times more air than the servers require because the cooling system caters for the racks with the highest cooling needs, while the racks emitting less power get more cooling than they need.

Shreuders reveals that an average data centre in SA would save R8.6 million with an 88% saving of cooling costs.

According to Gartner, more than half of data centre managers plan to expand capacity at their existing data centre sites by the end of 2011 while 30% plan to build new data centres.

The research firm last week released a survey which showed that 47% of surveyed respondents claim that storing huge amounts of data is their biggest challenge, followed by increasing data centre performance and scalability (37%) and managing network congestion (36%).

In addition, 62% of respondents reported that they will invest in new data archiving systems by the end of 2011 in order manage the increasing demand of storage capacity.

Naveen Mishra, a Gartner principal research analyst, says: "Many data centre managers were forced to defer infrastructure upgrades and extend technology refresh cycles in 2009 and, as a result, are now dealing with aging infrastructure or, in some cases, product obsolescence.

“Vendors wishing to tap into this reopening market should propose infrastructure solutions that are high in efficiency and offer scalability as the demand grows, thus helping the companies to prepare for a return to growth."

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