Cooling Tops User Energy Issues

As users wrestle with spiraling energy costs, many IT managers are turning their attention to cooling systems, which have now surpassed server and storage hardware as the big data center power hogs.

At a user event in New York today, CIOs and analysts explained how the big chill can mean big money. "Power and cooling have become the number one problem for data centers today," said Michelle Bailey, vice president of data center trends at IDC, during a keynote this morning.

"We're hearing that anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of energy costs are not IT-based," explained the analyst, adding that this is being driven by chiller cabinets, air conditioning, and power distribution units (PDUs).

These sentiments were echoed by Gerard Shockley, assistant director of technical services at Boston University. "These are all huge consumers of power," he said, highlighting the energy impact of chillers and air conditioners in his own data center. "I would estimate that the majority of the power consumption is for cooling."

The Green Grid Association, a consortium of users and vendors which aims to address these issues, estimates that IT hardware consumes less than one third of the energy pumped into a data center. Chiller cabinets are the major consumers, typically consuming 33 percent of power, followed by UPSes (18 percent), according to the group's research. Air conditioning units and PDUs account, respectively, for 9 percent and 5 percent of users' energy bills.Confronted with these problems, IDC's Bailey urged users to consider some of the basics of data center design, ensuring that they implement hot and cold aisles and raised floors, which help remove hot air from hardware and keep cooling costs down. The analyst also pointed to server and storage virtualization as a way for users to streamline their data centers. "Through that, you can drive better [hardware] utilization and more [power] efficiency," she added.

One user that has already started to implement these strategies is financial organization Fannie Mae, which recently built what it describes as the world's first "green data center" in Maryland. As well as raised floors, Fannie Mae has taken a number of measures to keep its cooling costs down, according to Brian Cobb, the firm's vice president of enterprise systems management.

"Our cabling is overhead in the data center," he explained during a keynote here today. "This minimizes the time that we have to go under the [floor] and disrupt the airflow."

Efficient cooling is not the only green feature of Fannie Mae's data center, and Cobb is looking to save energy wherever he can. "In the data center we keep the lights off," he said, adding that this shaves around $360,000 a year off Fannie Mae's electricity bill.

Even the water used to irrigate the lawns, gardens, and trees on the 35-acre site is tapped from an environmentally friendly source. "We capture waste water into storage tanks," said Cobb, explaining that he can save up to 25,000 gallons of water a day.The firm, which has 3700 Tbytes of SAN storage and 5,000 Unix servers split across three data centers in the D.C. area, has also learned energy lessons from its other sites. One facility, in particular, forced Cobb and his team to rethink their water supply strategy when they were building the Maryland data center.

"Our data center in Virginia lost water pressure from the city," he said, explaining that this meant he was unable to get enough water to run his air conditioning units. "We had to take the server load down to keep the place cool."

As a result, Fannie Mae was careful to build three water feeds into its Maryland site, to prevent a repeat occurrence.

Not all users at today's event were as blessed with a state-of-the-art data center. One IT manager from an Ohio-based insurance firm, who asked not to be named, bemoaned his own set-up. "We have got a 30-year-old data center [and] cooling is our biggest issue," he said, explaining that it accounts for over half of his energy costs. "[The design] is pushing air from the top to the bottom of systems, rather than bottom to top."

Given that hot air rises, this is making the data center even warmer, according to the exec. "We're moving out of that data center, hopefully in the next eight to 12 months," he said.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.