Lex Coors, vice-president at data centre technology and engineering group Interxion looks at improving efficiency in the
datacentre by intelligent design

With data centre greenhouse emissions set to overtake the airline industry in the next 5-10 years and quadruple by 2020 it has never been more critical for organisations to gain greater efficiencies from their data centre.

 The first step to achieving these efficiencies is through the improvement of a data centre’s Power Usage Efficiency Ratio or PUE. PUE ratios are calculated and can be used as a guide to define a data centre’s efficiency or ‘green’ credentials.

 Recent research has found that a data centre which have a low PUE of between 1.5 – 1.75, implements lean design and has established measurement data with demonstrable year-on-year improvements can be classified as green or energy efficient.
 However, an inefficient data centre is recognised as anything with a PUE of greater than 2, has legacy equipment installed, no measurement tools and inefficient components. These are generally in-house. So how does an organisation go about optimising data centre efficiency and improving its PUE?

 For organisations to reduce their PUE they need to have an active focus on the following three areas: external efficiency, internal efficiency and customer efficiency. 

 They need to be monitoring their PUE ratios deemed as best practice and externally against industry standards set by the likes of the Green Grid and Uptime Institute. Monitoring efficiency gains and losses against an external body allows organisations to benchmark themselves and highlights the technology and practices within their data centres which need to be improved upon or replicated. Ultimately, delivering a green gauge for the organisation to work from.

 Once an organisation has benchmarked itself externally it then needs to evaluate its internal efficiencies. These can been split into two categories design and operational.

 It comes as no surprise that good design leads to lower Capex and better efficiency, but what design is good design? A model which has had proven success both in terms of efficiency and green credentials is Modular Design. Modular Design was developed as it allows for future data centre expansion without interruption of services to customers.

 Recent research by McKinsey and the Uptime Institute has identified five key steps to achieving operational efficiency gains. The first step is to eliminate comatose servers, this will equal an overall gain of 10-25%. The second step is to virtualize, which leads to gains of 25-30%. The third step is to upgrade older equipment leading to a 10-20% gain. The fourth is to reduce demand for new servers, which can also increase efficiency by 10-20%. The final step is to introduce greener and more power efficient servers and enable power saving features, this also equates to a 10-20% gain. By following the above steps an organisation can look to achieve an overall efficiency gain of 65%, significantly improving its PUE ratio.  

The third and final piece of the efficiency puzzle is customer focus.  An efficient data centre should have hands-on expert support in energy efficiency implementation efforts, as well as the best practice customer installation check lists.
 Staff need to be able to advise on how to reduce temperatures and energy usage though things like innovative hot and colds aisle designs. They need  to have the tools in place to measure and analyse efficiency, implement the latest efficiency ratings, develop and implement first phase actions and integrate figures and ratings with customers CSR. Without the expertise in place organisation will find it hard to reach their desired efficiency gains.

 Green and efficient data centres are real and achievable, but emissions and power costs are rising fast, so we need to do more now. Organisations must work together especially when it comes to measurement. Vendors should be providing standard meters on all equipment to measure energy usage versus productivity; if you don’t know whether your wasting energy, how can you change it?

 But it’s not just vendors who are responsible, data centre providers should give leadership in industry standards and ratings that work, data centre design and operational efficiency steps and support for all customer IT efficiency improvements. What is apparent is that the whole industry, from the power suppliers to the rack makers, all need to work together to improve efficiencies and ensure that we are all at the forefront of efficient, green data centre design.