Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Operating a Data Centre
sitioning of cooling equipment in the room
at the data centres
2. Consolidation and virtualisation of ICT
provisions. This leads to a concentration of
facilities in a limited number of locations,
concentration of applications on a limited
number of servers and concentration of data
storage.
3. Optimisation of the lay-out of the data
centres. This includes an optimum position
of the hardware, an optimum flow of warm
and cold air through the centres, optimum
positioning of the tiles with openings in
the computer floor, inclusion of hot and
cold corridors when placing racks with ICT
equipment etc.
4. Improvement of the cabling and the elec-
tricity supply. This includes the use of new
UPS equipment, separation of power and
data cabling, installation using flexible and
coverable cable channels.
5. Replacement of older equipment, depending
on the depreciation period. Energy savings
through using LCD screens and blade servers
for example.
6. Introduction of the small sustainability such
as working with lights off, switching off
equipment automatically, remote operation
of data centres.
The Situation
Within the framework of this study, three types of
data centre operators were interviewed. These are
organizations with in-house data centres such as
the Fontys University of Applied Sciences, the City
of Amsterdam and the Rabo Bank; organizations
that have placed their ICT provisions in a computer
room that is managed by a third party, such as the
Kadaster and internet service provider Byte; and
organizations that manage these computer rooms,
such as the Telecity Group.
With the latter, the Dutch government came
to an agreement at sector level in 2008. This
agreement is known as the MeerJaren-Afspraak
energie-efficiëntie (Long-term agreement on
energy efficiency in the Netherlands) (MJA) for
the ICT sector. In long-term agreements like this,
businesses, ministries, sector organizations as
well as provinces and municipalities enter into
obligations with each other.
Apart from long-term agreements, data centres
have to deal with Codes of conduct, which origi-
nate from the European Union. Since 2008, there
is the Code of Conduct on Data Centres Energy
Efficiency. The idea behind this Code of Conduct
is that organizations by measuring and monitoring
their own energy consumption in detail will start
to reflect on this energy consumption and adjust it.
Figure 4 shows the effects of possible mea-
sures on energy consumption. This does not take
into account that manufacturing of devices such
as for example LCD screens, which consume
little energy when used, do cost more energy in
the manufacturing process as compared to old-
fashioned cathode-ray tubes. Apart from taking
these measures, the choice of location for a data
centre is important from a sustainability perspec-
tive. The use of free cooling for instance, requires
a low outside temperature. Being able to reuse
heat demands that centres are positioned in an
area where one is able to reuse this heat, such
as for example in market gardening businesses.
Generic Measures for Arriving at a
Larger Degree of Sustainability
According to Rasmussen (2006) and Van de
Graaf (2009), the demands on reduction of energy
consumption and arriving at the use of more sus-
tainable materials can be achieved by operators
of data centres by taking the following measures:
1. Measures with regard to cooling. This
includes the use of free cooling and the po-
