Last April, Greenpeace estimated that the global collective of datacentres was accounting for nigh-on 2% of the world’s total energy consumption, and that the growth rate was then running at 12% a year. Research by the BroadGroup, back as far as 2006, found that an average UK datacentre was consuming more electricity than the City of Leicester. Even back then there were 1,500 datacentres in the UK alone – there are a lot more now, with more coming.
While the growth in the number of datacentres is inevitable, reigning in the growth rate in energy consumption becomes ever more important. With the commoditisation of the computer resources planning for those resources becomes, relatively speaking, an easier task, but that now only leaves more time if datacentre technical staff to plan how they can reduce energy consumption and their carbon footprint.
Vigilent is one of a growing number of companies offering ever-more complex energy management systems to help datacentres control their energy consumption, particularly in the area of air-conditioning management.
As an example, it recently worked with data integration specialist, Informatica, to help it achieve a 73% reduction in its datacentre energy consumption. It managed to cut this by 250,000 kWh per year, eliminating 333,370 pounds of CO2 emissions in the process.
In addition, Informatica has been able to use the analytical tools provided by Vigilent’s Intelligent Energy Management System to gain a better insight into issues such as the timing and duration of heavy IT loads, and provide actionable data that can be used to manage real-time load balancing across the compute resources.
The Vigilent system provides dynamic, automated control of complex cooling environments, using a wireless mesh network of sensors to collect data continually up to a thousand or more locations. The resulting data is then aggregated and modeled in real time by an artificial intelligence engine that can predict the individual interactions of all of the air handling units within a facility, as well as the group behaviour. Cooling and air handling resources are then dynamically adjusted for maximum efficiency, responding to changing IT loads and other environmental changes.
High ambient temperature data centres
Posted by alanpriestley on Tue, 24/01/2012 - 14:41The coming year is likely to see a significant amount of attention paid to the idea of data centers running at high temperatures. Intel-based servers are able to operate in a wide temperature envelope, which is critical in the ongoing drive towards more efficient data centres. In terms of the improvement in energy efficiency, the savings are thought to be as much as 4% per degree of increase. There are many examples in the industry of the energy efficiency savings that have been realised through this method (Google, Facebook etc.). I have also video blogged on this subject and you might find it interesting in reference to this discussion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov8zpqYSLcw
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