Practical Steps To Green The Data Centre

Of course, there are other things you can do. Brown suggests that you can probably save a lot of energy, and thus money, by consolidating your operations on your newer servers using a virtualised environment and simply shutting off your old servers.

Julius Neudorfer, CTO of North American Access Technologies, agrees, and says that a combination of picking the right servers for the work and the right power and cooling solution for the servers will result in a major savings of energy without having to replace much, if any, of your data centre.

Neudorfer suggests focusing instead on more efficient use. He said the greatest return is on the cooling side, and for that, a data centre needs a strategy for containment and keeping hot and cold air from mixing.

Neudorfer said that products are available to allow containment to be retrofitted in existing data centres, including solutions from APC, Rittal and Knuerr. “You can do it rack by rack without any major interruption of service,” he said. Neudorfer noted that in many cases, retrofitting your data centre can simply mean placing a transparent cover over the hot or cold aisles between racks.

Along with cover plates on the racks themselves, this will provide an easy, do-it-yourself containment solution. Neudorfer also suggests moving the servers to the bottom of the racks, since the coldest air is at the bottom.

Neudorfer and Coors both recommend finding ways to use what they call “free cooling.” This means that you can use your existing ventilation system to bring in outside air, as Golding suggests, or use outside air to cool your HVAC instead of using a compressor, as is done with most AC systems. Either way, you avoid use of the air conditioning compressor, perhaps the single biggest energy use in the data centre.

But still, what about all those servers? Kosten Metreweli suggests making sure you actually need them before you even worry about moving them or virtualising them. He said the biggest problem faced by many large data centres is “not knowing what’s in your data centre.”

Metreweli, vice president of Tideway, said that when he audits a data centre, it’s not unusual to find that data centre inventories are wrong. “If we compare what we’ve found with what the customer has recorded, they’ve only documented what they have 50 to 75 percent of the time. They have servers sitting there that no one knows what they do.”

Metreweli said that it’s common to find servers that support applications or databases that are no longer in use, and that simply shutting these servers down will go unnoticed.

He said he also finds switches, routers and other network devices that are no longer being used but that are still running, still using energy and still requiring cooling.