Managing carbon emissions and energy consumption in the data centre

Rising power costs, a new energy rating system and the tax on emissions are forcing data centre operators to make energy management a key priority. An electrical contractor could play a key role in this area by helping data centre managers review, control and monitor energy usage.

Electrical consultants are privy to a broad scope of functions for their customers. From managing small-scale electrical circuits to designing and deploying multisite data centres, the consultant’s role is critical to customers’ operational success.

In Australia, one of the central themes evolving over the past decade of rapid infrastructure growth is efficiency. This has been manifest in different forms over the years, from improving efficiency to reducing cost, to managing efficiency to improving availability and now, in its most recent guise, improving efficiency to manage carbon emissions. The industry is on the frontline of carbon trading schemes and carbon ‘taxes’, not only in Australia but around the world. As governments continue to explore and implement carbon emissions standards and carbon reduction commitments, many companies will be required to participate in auction-based carbon emissions trading schemes that are designed to provide economic and reputational incentives for achieving reductions in emissions.

Often these schemes take the form of a selective industry tax, as is the case with Australia’s recently implemented carbon tax. But regardless of how it’s implemented, managing carbon emissions has become a major cost factor for numerous large industries. In many cases, those companies that do not reduce emissions could face financial penalties in the form of emissions credits they will need to purchase. They could even have their performance published in an annual league table in relation to other scheme participants. Contractors play a very particular role that can have a significant impact on customers’ abilities to mitigate the effects of a trading scheme or carbon tax, without compromising availability of performance.

Sizing up the challenge

Often the first step in managing change of this scale is: understanding the scale. If we don’t know what we’re dealing with, it’s very difficult to manage it effectively. In broad brushstrokes, Australia’s carbon tax has committed the government - and by extension organisations operating in Australia - to reduce carbon emissions 5% below 2000 levels in 2020, regardless of what other countries do, and preferably by up to 15 or 25%, depending on the scale of global action. These targets will require cutting expected emissions by at least 23% relative to business as usual in 2020.

What this means quantitatively for individual organisations is, at this stage, unknown. What is known is that the cost of doing business is going to increase due to increases in costs of raw materials and commodities that contribute to carbon emission, such as power. Even if these costs are offset by savings in the form of tax rebates or other vehicles, the fundamental designs of our data centres in the future will need to be carefully considered in terms of their environmental impact, and public impact. That latter concept, the public impact, is worth mentioning here. We don’t work in a vacuum, and even if in the long term we discover ways to limit the ‘hit’ of a carbon tax on our customers’ bottom line, the perception of how we do business with respect to the environment could be just as important as the cost.

We therefore need to know how every aspect of a data centre design - from the equipment to the critical support infrastructure - is impacting the new carbon tax ground rules. 

Often a simple way to understand the scale of change possible in a legacy facility is to conduct a data centre audit, which will provide a good starting point for your customer in understanding their current energy consumption and data centre performance. From here some basic improvement measures can be set and a range of solutions identified to optimise their data centre elements and improve energy efficiency.

What we know

Data centres have traditionally been designed with extra headroom to accommodate growth, but during the last decade demand escalated so quickly that added IT capacity consumed available headroom and outpaced supply in terms of floor space and power and cooling capacity.

These changes were further exacerbated by the increased focus on data centre energy consumption. With both the density and quantity of servers rising, data centre energy consumption became a significant factor in terms of IT cost management and, in some companies, response to concerns about global warming. Early efforts to reduce data centre energy consumption focused on reducing costs around cooling, which accounts for a third of energy consumption. Subsequent efforts took a more holistic approach that recognised the interdependency of data centre systems and shifted the focus to the IT systems that create the need for cooling.

Today, data centres have reached a level of complexity beyond the point where we can point to one or two factors that alone would significantly impact the carbon emissions of the facility. Fortunately, we don’t have to, because technology - in the form of facility-wide management tools - gives us an eagle-eyed view over every aspect of our customers’ data centres, and specifically, the carbon output of every interdependent systems we’re managing.

Of course, going from a reactive to a proactive approach to infrastructure monitoring and management requires a new type of management system that provides visibility into the data centre’s physical infrastructure within both the IT and facility domains and across these two domains.

This shift gave birth to the idea of data centre infrastructure management (DCIM), a superset of infrastructure monitoring that encompasses the ability to manage the data centre’s physical infrastructure to optimise resource utilisation, efficiency and availability. By enabling management across the gap between IT and infrastructure, data centre operators have visibility into the true capacity of their IT and infrastructure systems, allowing them to manage closer to actual capacity, rather than the conservative estimates that leave some percentage of capacity unused as a buffer.

More importantly, these tools help customers gain more visibility and control of their data centre. Gaining control of the infrastructure environment leads to an optimised data centre that improves availability and energy efficiency, extends equipment life, proactively manages the inventory and capacity of the IT operation, increases the effectiveness of staff and decreases the consumption of resources. And, in the frame of this discussion, contribute to the containment and reduction of carbon emissions.

An informed approach

The key to achieving these performance optimisation benefits is a comprehensive infrastructure management solution that improves the visibility that a customer has of the performance of their data centre.

A data centre assessment provides insight into current conditions (read output quantities) and opportunities for improvement. After establishing that baseline, data centre infrastructure monitoring will collect power, temperature and equipment status for critical devices in the rack, row and room. Data is continuously collected to not only provide a window into equipment and facility performance, but point out trends and prevent problems wherever they may be located.

For example, if an unmonitored branch power circuit operating at 80% or more of full capacity has a load blindly applied, it could cause the distribution breaker to trip, powering down that entire distribution leg. Or take the addition of blade servers to an unmonitored rack. Users could be at the thermal threshold of heat creep, unknowingly subjecting systems to potentially serious problems.

Another example involves batteries, often described as the weakest link in the power chain. The best way to determine a battery’s health without discharging it is to use a monitoring system that measures the internal resistance of all of the cells in the battery, using an integrated battery monitoring service that combines state-of-the-art technology with proactive maintenance and service response.

Infrastructure monitoring provides this real-time control, historical performance trending, alarm notifications and event escalations to minimise or eliminate downtime. In addition, users can manage energy consumption through thermal and power metering.

Through optimisation of data centre elements and design, a comprehensive infrastructure management system can help data centre managers improve equipment utilisation, reduce server deployment times and more accurately forecast future equipment requirements, resulting in operating and capital expense reductions. Managers not only improve inventory and capacity management, but also process management, ensuring all assets are performing at optimum levels. In turn, this minimises the impact of carbon emissions per node, given that emissions are now becoming part and parcel of any efficiency calculation. Effective optimisation can provide a common window into the data centre, improving forecasts, managing supply and demand, improving levels of efficiency and availability.

Clearing the air

During the data centre’s next decade, opportunities to improve efficiency, optimise performance and protect the environment will exist throughout the three cycles: design and deployment, operations, and management and planning.

Data centres moving to a higher density IT space can improve efficiency and avoid compromising availability, as the higher density puts additional stress on the power and cooling infrastructure, by using the visibility and control that comes with comprehensive infrastructure management. It all starts at the design and deployment stage, where we can leverage pre-engineered solutions and high-density architectures to reduce the time, space and capital required for construction of the building. During operation, we can reduce costs by using efficient technologies and strategies while simultaneously decreasing downtime costs by employing high-availability configurations. And additional savings are possible by using infrastructure management controls to streamline operations and facilitate a comprehensive maintenance program.

Ironically, the key is to look beyond carbon emissions alone when considering efficiency and to take every opportunity throughout the life cycle of the data centre to achieve efficiencies, without compromising performance.