The Green Grid gives its advice to reduce emissions

In challenging economic times, every organisation must be seen to be evaluating their operations with a view to making them as economical as possible.  This is particularly true of data centres.  However, with the correct measures, data centres can be optimised to save energy and money.  Here are The Green Grid’s top tips on how to achieve this:

Who is responsible?
It is easy to pass the buck and believe that someone else is taking responsibility for the data centre.  It is important to realise that this isn’t the role of a single person.  In many organisations, IT procures the computers, storage, and network equipment while the operating expenses are absorbed by other functions in the organisation.  As such, to assess the current state and future possibilities of the data centre there must be an alignment of the numerous people involved in its construction and maintenance across numerous departments.

Become aware- don’t hide your head in the sand
It is startling how many managers still don’t know what equipment is in their data centre or how much electricity it consumes.  Before any steps can be taken to improve efficiency, you must assess consumption and how much it is costing.  Identify and analyse all existing IT equipment within the data centre, determine their business purpose, measure their power consumption and compare the current performance efficiency with a new server platform.

This is the prime opportunity to remove any redundant servers that may be in the data centre.  By optimising the physical components of the data centre to current load and future predictions, there is the potential to eliminate up to 50% of electricity costs in real-world installations.

Evaluate the physical elements of the data centre
One of the key challenges is the sheer size of your data centre.  While size can be reduced through the removal of redundant servers, also consider consolidating your most inefficient servers into a single new unit which will enhance performance, improve system utilisation and give you more space.

Alterations in the layout of the data centre alone can have significant implications:

• Reorient your server, racks and rows - Arrange racks in the “hot aisle/cold aisle” orientation
• Raise data centre temperature - Temperatures have traditionally been set as low as 13° C.  However, data centre equipment will safely operate at temperatures ranging from 15° to 32° C and the recommended range falls between 18° C to 27° C.
• Strategically position vented floor tiles - the ideal design would optimise cool air flow by “tuning” floor tiles through varying locations and by regulating the proportion of vents that are open at any given time.

Maximise settings and software
Many data centres do not enable power management features within the installed servers. Power-management features should always be enabled to ensure most efficient operation of the server.

The installation of more efficient power equipment triggers is also recommended.  For example, lighting can become even more energy efficient through the implementation of timers or motion sensors.

Power down servers when they are not in use
Certain types of servers will regularly go unused for random, lengthy periods of time - these should be targeted for powering down.

Optimise Cooling 
The cooling systems of today’s typical legacy data centres are often highly inefficient, primarily due to the fact that cooling high-density equipment was not originally a requirement.  However, today there are numerous methods that can implemented, both within existing data centres and new set-ups.  Specifically managers should look to use ‘free air cooling’ where possible.

Geographic location and climate conditions can significantly speed the payback from deploying cooling systems.  The Green Grid has created free tools for data centre managers which identify how much outside air – also known as free cooling – is available for individual data centres across various regions.       

Continue to monitor and measure data centre performance
Once an efficient data centre is established, it is imperative to continue to monitor and measure its performance.  The EU recently launched a Data Centre Code of Conduct using The Green Grid Data Centre Infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE) metric to measure how much of total energy usage is consumed by IT equipment and how much is consumed by the facility itself.

Through continuous evaluation the data centre manager can identify opportunities to improve a data centre’s operational efficiency, to compare efficiencies with competitive data centres and to determine opportunities to repurpose energy for additional IT equipment.