John Hatcher went to meet Steve O’Donnell, head of datacentres at BT, and found a company that is committed to lower its carbon footprint, with a range of ways to manage the process

Add to the fact that BT is trying to reduce its carbon footprint by 80 per cent by 2016 (the company has already reduced its carbon footprint by 60 per cent since 1996), plus consolidate its 53 major data centres around the world, means that Steve has one of the most challenging jobs in the data centre world.

Not that he is letting this daunt him. Indeed he is near evangelical about some issues that effect the datacentre world, but let us return to that later.

His primary function as Global Head of Datacentres, is to consolidate BT’s global network of datacentres. One of the first problems that Steve had to solve was mapping BT’s large estate, so Steve enlisted the help of DCMI with its product called Migrata. Migrata is a data centre migration manager tool that functions as the single point of information for a migration project. The tool reduces risk by producing guideline tasks for project managers to follow and highlighting key dependencies on other migrations. Migrata is application centric and thus reduces the impact on users. As dependencies are clear, the migration of multiple applications can take place at the same time (typically a weekend) without the inherent risks.

BT was looking for an application centric way of consolidating and migrating data and Steve was impressed by what DCMI had to offer. “As far as I am aware there is nothing out there like Migrata. You cannot manage a system without measuring it and Migrata takes a snapshot of the existing estate. We then measure what we have application by application and can ask our businesses whether they really need to run the application. We also wanted to make sure that we were maximizing our utilization and found that in a Windows environment we were running at 2 per cent utilization and Unix less than 15 per cent. We have been able to use our datacentres better and now run at around 60 per cent on both.”

By improving utilization, this means that BT has been able to reduce server and storage usage, reducing its energy consumption. BT also found servers that were not running applications, and by turning off servers it has reduced maintenance costs, there is less management of back up and BT has a much cleaner estate.

This does not mean that BT is closing any of its datacentres, as its Global Services division is expanding and Steve says that there is going to be a huge demand for datacenters, in the coming years.

Indeed, BT has set up its own mini-datacentres throughout the UK, called Metro-nodes, which it uses for its own datacentre needs, and this is where Steve’s view on datacentre issues becomes very interesting as for the past three years BT has only used fresh air cooling in the Metro-nodes.

Steve explains. “We told our suppliers that we would only take equipment that would run between 5 and 50 degree celcius. We then simply use fresh air cooling as the average summer temperature in the UK is around 20 degree C. In the three years that we have run like this we are more reliable and efficient as there is less to go wrong plus we have saved over 40 per cent of our electricity bill. We also only take in DC electricity, which means we do not have to convert the power and have saved at least another 20 per cent of our energy costs. In the UK I don’t believe that air conditioning or water cooling is necessary. If you locate your datacentre outside of London, you can buy more land for less, spread your racks across a wider area and reduce your electricity costs and carbon footprint. We have not rolled out this programme externally yet as we know that customers will be nervous as they have all been sold cooling systems. However, we have the proof that they are unnecessary and are looking forward to getting our message across.

“We have already reduced our UK CO2 emissions by 60% since 1996. Our target is to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% (against our 1996 baseline) by 2016. We will do this by further improving energy efficiency and using green electricity. We buy nearly all of BT’s UK electricity from low-carbon sources, including renewables and combined heat and power.”

BT says it is one of the biggest buyers of green energy on the planet and by using intelligent processes such as DCMI’s software is aiming to make its datacentres much less energy dependent. In time all companies will be compelled to act like BT, so don’t say you haven’t been warned.