Harry Forbes, CTO at Nexans Cabling Solutions looks at how the CRC scheme will affect your business On 1 April the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme came into effect in the UK. Formerly known as the Carbon Reduction Commitment, the Scheme, which will operate as a ‘cap-and-trade’ mechanism, is a central part of the Government’s plans to reduce the country’s C02 emissions. The scheme is expected to affect 20,000 of the UK’s biggest energy users at first, but many experts believe that it will only be a short time before it is expanded.

A recent survey of data centre professionals by Nexans revealed that whilst over 90% have heard of the CRC, more than half do not understand it. However, energy saving was rated as the biggest concern facing them at the moment, showing that even organisations not directly affected by the Scheme are concerned about energy efficiency.

Data centres are often targeted when organisations are considering energy consumption. Collectively they are responsible for up to 3.3% of Britain’s total grid power, and a recent report by Greenpeace suggested that at current growth rates data centres and telecommunication networks will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatts hours of electricity in 2020. However, data centres are also critical to ensuring businesses stay competitive. Therefore organisations need to find simple and cost-efficient ways to monitor and reduce energy consumption in their current data centres, and plan effectively to ensure that future data centres are as energy efficient as possible.

Cooling is one of the main culprits when it comes to power consumption in data centres. It can account for as much as 60% of a centre’s power use, and this is only set to increase as more and more data centres roll out virtualised servers. In many cases this high rate of power consumption is due to having a large number of high energy servers in the same or adjacent racks, which leads to an unbalance of server row power and cooling, with some racks needing much more cooling than others. By reviewing the layout of the servers and racks, organisations can reduce the inefficiencies of the cooling systems and save energy.

However, in order to do this data centre managers need to know exactly where power is being used, and this information is rarely readily available. To assist in this, managers could install Intelligent Infrastructure Management (IIM) and Environmental Monitoring & Access Control (EMAC) tools and products in their data centres. This would allow them to meter actual power usage down to rack and device level, and produce trend data for single or groups of physical systems. This information is crucial for managers to know before they can make improvements to their centres.

For managers planning future data centres, better quality cabling can make a significant difference in energy consumption and the industry is developing new cabling standards, such as Energy Efficient Ethernet. This includes the major energy saving feature Wake-on-LAN, where transceivers and servers go into a sleep state when not in use and upon receipt of a ‘magic packet’ are awoken and made ready for communication. Since servers can still consume up to 70% of their full power when idle, this advanced technology can lead to hundreds of watts saved by each server.

The industry is also developing standards for Data Centre Ethernet, which offers a lossless Ethernet and enables a single unified networking fabric through Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). This has an additional benefit for data centre managers as it would allow a cabling platform up to 100 metres, meaning that patching would be possible between any two points in the network and so power load and cooling could be more evenly distributed throughout the centre.
Managers can also improve energy efficiency by using higher grade Cat 7A cabling which includes features such as Power Backoff and offers the potential for energy savings of as much as 30%-50% in data centre mode through improvements in DSP design.

The CRC Scheme is the first piece of legislation targeting the UK’s biggest energy users, but all organisations need to think seriously and act quickly to increase their energy efficiency, protect themselves against the impact of future energy efficiency legislation and ensure that their data centres have longevity.