Data Centers Going Green

Recently, Kenya Data Networks (KDN) launched their new data center at the Nairobi based Sameer Business Park. The Tier 3 data centre will cut gas emissions and energy use through an improved architectural design and partial use of renewal energy. It will be among the first data centers to use of latest solar-power technology to provide the energy requirements of the facility. The data centre is poised to offer services such as hosting data and software applications to serve international and local businesses. It is expected that the centre will relieve the region from having to seek data back-up services in Europe and America, and reduce on the business operations expenditure.

Looking at the East African region, the Rwandan government has commenced on the construction of a data center. The World Bank has provided US$24 million to facilitate Rwanda's construction of its center and the country's plan to connect to the regional undersea cables running under the Indian Ocean, including Seacom, TEAMs and the EaSSY project, in order to address connectivity problems. On the other hand, Vodacom is seeking to cement its presence in East Africa's data business. In Rwanda, the construction of Vodacom’s data center is being carried out by a Swedish company, Coromatic, at a cost of more than US$5 million. All of these data centers are designed to utilize power efficiently and produce less emission.

Similarly, Google is preparing to open its newest data center, a large facility in a former paper mill in Hamina, Finland. The facility uses the sea to replace the chiller in its cooling system, collecting cool water from an inlet pipe located about 7.5 meters beneath the surface of the Baltic Sea. The technique, known as "Free Cooling", achieves cooling by removing heat from your facility without using the chiller. This is done by using low temperature ambient air, evaporating water, or using a large thermal reservoir. Minimizing the use of chillers is typically the largest opportunity for savings for large organizations with huge data centers.

IBM teamed with New York State and Syracuse University to open the Green Data Center at Syracuse University provides a showcase for a number of state-of-the-art technologies designed to reduce power consumption and emissions. Built at a cost of $12.4 million, the 12,000 square-foot facility generates its own power on site, for electrical, heating, and cooling systems. It houses energy efficient IBM Blade Center, Power 575, and z10 servers and is expected to use 50% less energy than a comparably sized data center using traditional power sources and hardware. IBM contributed $5 million in design services and equipment to the project, while the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority kicked in about $2 million.

In 2009, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd, opened its green data center in Yokohama, Japan. The Yokohama Third Center occupies 10,000 square meters of total floor space. A rooftop garden at the HDS data center provides the building with shade that contributes to the lowering of summertime indoor temperature by as much as three degrees Celsius. Nitrogen gas fire extinguishers and cooling systems using outdoor air, both of which have zero ozone depletion and global warming potentials, are installed as measures contributing to the improvement of regional and global environments. The opened green facility incorporates power-efficient data center technology designed to achieve a benchmarking rating of 1.6 Power Usage Effectiveness.

What about small and midsize companies? They are unable to spend thousands of shillings for sea water systems, solar panels or wind generators. How do they make their data centers environmentally friendly? Direct energy consumption in the data center, is significant and small and midsize companies have the need to pursue greater energy efficiency along with performance. There are cheap and simple ways of minimizing energy consumption and improve efficiency in the data center. For instance, try not to cool parts of the data center where there is no equipment.

About 10 to 30 percent of the servers in most data centers are usually underutilized. Conduct an inventory on which of these servers can be virtualized onto another new server and turn those older servers off. Also, turn the lights off in your data center. Servers are not afraid of the dark and can easily be managed remotely. It is also important to use scalable or modular systems so you use only the needed energy capacity. So, big or small organization, you can have your data center going green!