Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and cooling. Next, this is purchased by their pro-
curement department. The department responsible
for housing monitors the measurements of energy
consumption.
In the interview on the procurement of build-
ings, cooling and energy, the buyers of the City of
Amsterdam and those of the Fontys Universities
remark that in their case, there is consolidation
of many small data centres into one single big
one with an emergency fallback data centre. This
concentration of facilities results in considerably
less energy consumption. In this consolidation,
one also investigates better use of storage and
processing capacity. This way, consolidation
of ICT provisions has more impact than the re-
placement of old ICT hardware by entirely new.
Furthermore, the buyer of the Fontys University
of Applied Sciences remarks that in 2009 the
procurement of housing and energy is separated
from the procurement of ICT provisions.
capacity, which saves energy. If furthermore, the
temperature of the outside air is sufficiently low,
then it should be possible to just use outside air
for cooling.
During the study it was established that in the
Netherlands with its average temperature of 11°
Celsius only the larger data centres use cooling by
means of outside air and make use of a modular
set-up of the cooling installation. Furthermore,
new methods for cooling are often not discussed
until a new data centre is started.
The same as for cooling equipment goes for
the modular set-up of uninterruptible power sup-
plies (UPS). A UPS should be set up modular,
thus enabling adjustment of the UPS capacity
according to the situation. This because the UPS
capacity is not used to its full potential in many
organizations.
For suppliers of ICT provisions, the sustain-
ability aspect turns up as soon as customers
decide to renew their hardware and when they
need to comply with legislation. It appears that
the interviewed customers proceed to purchase
more sustainable hardware when the economic
lifespan of their old hardware has expired and not
before. In that case, sustainability is one of the
criteria at acquisition. Moreover, at acquisition
suppliers often have to guarantee that they will
take care of environmentally friendly disposal of
the purchased hardware or resources.
With regard to actual the procurement con-
tracts of ICT provisions, the study is limited to
the purchase of workstations. In the organizations
as studied, one only discovered specifications re-
garding the purchase of workstations, in which the
requirements were formulated from the perspec-
tive of sustainability. Two recent requests for bits
were examined in more detail. These concerned
framework contracts for the purchase of hundreds
of workstations. In studying these requests for a
quotation, it emerged that governments copy their
sustainability criteria from the Energy Star Label
or from norms that have been derived from this.
Supply of Cooling Facilities,
ICT and Other Materials
Apart from suppliers of buildings and of energy,
data centres use suppliers for cooling equipment,
ICT hardware and for resources such as toners
and paper.
With regard to cooling equipment, suppliers
need to be able to supply equipment that is capable
of switching off individual parts automatically or
to switch to cooling by means of outside air. The
parts of a cooling installation that demand the
most energy are the compressors, the ventilators
and the pumps. When less cooling is required, the
compressors will be switched off first, whilst the
pumps and ventilators continue to function. At
even lower temperatures, the ventilators will also
run slower. Cooling units are explicitly referred
to in the plural because cooling facilities have to
be modular whenever possible. This allows for
addition and reduction of cooling capacity in incre-
ments. This also means that compressors, pumps
