Scottish Council Uses Free-Air Cooling For ‘Listed’ Data Centre

The Dumfries and Galloway local authority is hoping to achieve energy cost savings worth an estimated £20,000 a year by cutting its servers and moving them to a green data centre in a listed building.

The council, which servers 148,000 people spread over more than 2000 square miles, has worked with IBM to reduce the servers across the region from 325 down to just 75 as part of a hardware reorganisation that included the use of virtualisation. IBM and the council opted for a modular approach, prettily called Eric, which officially stands by for Energy Reduction In Circuit cooling,

Eric also means “Little by Little“, of course, after Frederic Farrar’s novel of moral turpitude in a Victorian boarding school, and the data centre will have equipment added piece by piece as power and cooling requirements increase.

Listed Building

The 75 servers will be located in one central location, and fittingly enough this is a former Victorian institutation, the Crichton Estate on the outskirts of Dumfries, instead of a purpose-built data centre or converted warehouse

Built as a mental hospital, the Estate is now run by a development trust for multiple uses, including an off-site campus for several educational institutions including the Open University, The University of Glasgow and the University of the West of Scotland. While education cuts (for instance by the University of Glasgow) are making this income uncertain, the site is building other revenues including data centres.

The one drawback is that the site and its buildings are listed because of their architectural significance. While limitations as not as severe as for A-listed building, the council’s new IT home is in Monreith House, which is category C listed, and considered a “building of local importance” – and therefore subject to tough rules and regulations.

“The new site posed a number of challenges for us, including the need to install the entire infrastructure necessary to support the new data centre whilst ensuring the preservation of the listed site,” explained Graeme McIlorum (left), technology services manager at Dumfries and Galloway Council.

“In addition to a number of administrative applications, the data centre also has to run our call centre and other critical council systems, providing care to vulnerable people around the clock, as we upgraded the data centre.”

The council’s former data centre is now used for back-up and recovery.

Free-Air Cooling

The new centralised facility will use outside air for six months of the year to cool the servers, which IBM estimates should equate to around a 25 to 30 percent energy saving because of the reduced need for air conditioning, hence the £20,000 per annum cost saving.

This is a technique known as free-air cooling, which traditionally uses outside air to cool servers, instead of running chillers which waste energy and reduce efficiency. The use of free-air cooling is now a common practice in data centre design, especially in locations like Scotland that have a climate that can support this. Free-air cooling is also increasingly used in container-based data centres. In December for example AST Modular put a free-air cooling module on top of its data centre container.

According to IBM, the new data centre room is 94 square metres and can hold approximately 25 racks. It is rated at 160 kilovolt-amperes, or 144 kilowatts, which works out to an average of four to five kilowatts per rack. The infrastructure consists mainly of IBM System x servers, as well as IBM System Storage technology.

“We worked closely with the council to meet its needs for this project, both in terms of green initiatives and return on investment,” said Caroline Miscio, IT services manager at IBM. “The ability to cool the data centre with outside air for six months of the year helps to reduce energy consumption and save money.”

Green Credentials

Miscio added that the solution will begin delivering a return on investment in less than five years, but that the energy efficient data centre has been designed to meet its needs for the next ten years.

In the past IBM has made no secret of its Smarter Planet strategy, and last year touted a renewed focus on smarter buildings. The company has also backed an educational degree for green data centre management.

Announced in September 2009, that two-year degree in the United States includes courses to help students get technical and business skills which IBM says will help them prepare for careers in the design and management of energy efficient data centres.