18
ENERGY MANAGEMENT
Modular gains
Chris Cutler, Data Centre
Efficiency Expert for Riello UPS
www.riello-ups.co.uk
Upgrading to modern, modular UPS
units promises both environmental
and economic benefits
Data centres already consume more than 3% of the world’s
total electricity and generate 2% of the planet’s greenhouse
gas emissions. That’s the same environmental impact as the
aviation industry, itself hardly a shining beacon of energy
efficiency.
What those statistics from the Global e-Sustainability
Initiative (GeSI) don’t make an allowance for, of course, is
the explosion in demand for increased data capacity the
sector currently faces. It’s predicted there’ll be at least
50 billion smart devices by 2020. Industry 4.0 and the
Internet of Things, with all their interconnected gadgets and
machines, will constantly create terabytes of new data that
needs safely storing and processing.
Unfortunately, it’s not simply the case of cranking up
electrical generation to help data centres provide this
additional capacity. Here in the UK, our National Grid is
creaking after decades of underinvestment, and new power
plants certainly don’t get built overnight. To meet these
unprecedented demands data centre managers need to
be smarter. They need to explore all avenues for efficiency
gains and improvements. To be blunt – they need to do
more with less.
The idea of a green data centre isn’t a new one.
And in recent years it’s true that the industry has taken
significant steps to minimise its environmental footprint.
Energy-intensive air conditioning and cooling can consume
anywhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of a data centre’s overall
power use. So the impressive advances made in cooling
technologies and techniques, such as configuring server
rooms into separate ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ aisles or the use of rear
door heat exchangers, are most welcome. However, these
efficiency improvements on their own won’t be enough.
From problem to solution
As luck would have it, another indispensable part of a data
centre’s infrastructure offers operators the opportunity
to achieve substantial additional energy savings too. An
uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is an essential part of
any data centre’s design. It’s the invaluable insurance policy
that provides reliable backup power if and when disaster
strikes. But just as IT servers consume electricity and require
constant cooling to operate safely, so too do UPS units.
In the past, this meant a UPS system would often form
part of a facility’s power consumption problem, something
that derailed many a drive for data centre efficiency. Until
recent years, data centre UPS were typically large, static
towers only capable of running at optimal efficiency when
carrying heavy loads of 80-90%.
To ensure the required redundancy for such units, there
was a tendency to oversize capacity during the initial
installation. As a result, many systems continuously ran at
lower, inefficient loads that wasted huge amounts of
www.networkseuropemagazine.com