Data Centers Go Green!

Piyush Somani, CEO, ESDS Software Solution discusses at length the nuances of new age data centers and provides a check list for emerging aspirants in this segment

How have data centers evolved in the last couple of years? Could you pinpoint certain key milestones in the evolution process?
Currently there are 54 commercial data centers spread across 13 cities in India, while the in-house Data Centers or Server rooms would be more than fifty thousand. In terms of data center space, it has grown from approximately 3.4 Million square feet in 2009 to about 5.2 Million sq ft in 2012. Approximate growth rate of Indian data center industry is around 25% per annum. A Gartner study indicated that the data center industry in India is expected to reach US $650 mn by the end of 2013 and it would go through a consistent growth through to 2016 reaching US $1.3 bn by then. Indian data center capacity will reach around 6.6 mn sq ft by then. By the year 2018, the data center industry should easily reach around US $2 bn providing immense growth opportunities to data center companies as well as the resources in this industry.
Uptime, Security and Managed Services have become critical for companies dependent on their online presence. Banks, government PSU's, enterprises and online service providers are the major demand generators for the Data Center industry. Data Center business has been a major attraction for Foreign Investors in last few years and the Data Center industry would continue to attract investors as well as IT Engineers for at least next 10 years in India.

Has the adoption of building green data centers increased? if yes, by how much percentage?
Indian Data Center service providers have not shown much inclination towards building Green Data Centers, but as per prediction of Gartner's analysts, commercial Data Centers from India will fulfill their 15 - 25% power requirements through Renewable Energy sources, like Solar power or wind power by 2016. Adoption of green building standards reduces the sensible heat load, which further helps in reducing the power consumed for cooling by at least 30%. Such saving of power will encourage the industry to adopt green building standards to build their new Data Centers or upgrade their existing Data Centers.

From a technology ROI standpoint, could you talk about some of the improvements the green data centers offer over a standard data centers?
A Green Data Center reduces sensible heat load, which reduces the power consumed for cooling the Data Center floor by 30% or more. Cloud Computing and Virtualization technology has increased the average utilization of processing power of servers, which has resulted in additional heat load per sq.ft area of a Data Center, Green Data Centers will help in providing optimum cooling for the Servers and also help in reducing threat imposed by Fire, which is a major concern for non-green Data Centers.

In terms of improving IT efficiency in relation to the company-at-large, how would you rank technology in the big picture of business strategy?
India can no longer rely on BPO jobs coming from the western countries. Growth in India and Indian IT industry will be driven by technology in the next 5 years. Slowdown in the American and European continent has forced the Indian companies to improve their efficiency and cut down unnecessary costs. Innovative technology in Data Center services is picking up demand, as the organization relying on the IT presence have started looking for making optimum utilization of the computing power available within their existing IT infrastructure. Cloud adoption is picking up in India for the same reason. Average utilization of processing power within India was below 7% till the last year, but adoption of Cloud Computing technology is increasing the average utilization of computing power and the average utilization of processing power will soon go beyond 10% in India. More research is being carried out by the Cloud platform developers to further improve the computing power utilization and provide highly redundant, fault tolerant and flexible cloud platform.

 

Has the data center created any new green-tech jobs or jobs in construction and other areas?
Few Universities have opened special branches to create Green-technology engineers. Students from such universities have started visiting the commercial data centers and they prepare reports on the power utilization and efficiency of such data centers. Such Green-tech engineers will create their special position in the IT Industry as well as construction industry in coming days.

How would you encourage other companies that are looking at the barriers and obstacles to building a green data center?
Initial investment is always on the higher side while building a Green Data Center, but the ROI is less than 5 years. Earlier it was difficult to find good consultants and Engineers to build a Green Data Center, but nowadays, you can find good amount of information on the web and green-tech engineers can be easily found through your buildings Architect or online search. ROI calculations should not be based on the current rates of power, but one should consider twice or thrice of the current rates for power over a period of 3 - 4 years and do the calculations accordingly. Green building is not only a power efficient building, but there are many other advantages which includes improved security against disaster like Fire incident.

The energy consumption in data centers becomes an increasingly crucial matter in terms of energy balance and costs. What are your views on this?
Power costs will never come down in the future and every Data Center operator is aware of this fact. Chip makers like Intel have invested billions of dollars to make processors that will consume lesser power and produce less heat, but the demand for computing power is increasing day by day, which adds to the heat load generated by the Servers/Storages/Network devices. Green data centers manage to cut down their sensible heat load, which helps them to cut down the power required for cooling by 30%.

What are your recommendations in-terms of cooling and air-conditioning?
Using chillers for cooling a large data center is highly power efficient, but having a large water body around your data center and using the same water body to exchange heat is highly beneficial. Water has the efficiency to cool down itself at night time by radiating its heat to the sky, which is at -22°C at night time. A large water body having few lakh liters of water will not have any major impact of the heat exchanged and its temperature may increase only by 1°C - 4°C due to the heat exchanged from the Data Center, but this heat is easily released into the atmosphere at night and there's very negligible evaporative losses in such large water bodies. Future Data Centers should be built on this concept, as this will help in cutting down power consumed by the heavy duty Compressors deployed in the Precision AC's of large data centers.

Which approaches and methods of air-conditioning and cooling do exist that differ fundamentally?
Precision AC's and Chillers are the most common cooling techniques deployed in most of the Data Centers. Chillers are considered to be power efficient in comparison to Precision AC's, but Chillers are considered only for the large Data Centers having more than 2000 Sq.ft of White Space and heat load of more than 100 tons. Data Centers in some of the European countries use filtered fresh air from the atmosphere for cooling, but that concept cannot work in India due to highly fluctuating ambient temperatures in India.

Which factors influence the energy efficiency of a refrigeration system in the data center?
Ambient temperature and the heat load are the 2 most important factors which control the efficiency of refrigeration system. Power consumption of the refrigeration systems increases during summer time, as the ambient temperature always remains high during summer days.

Which are the key characteristics of the data center of the future? What should be in the center of attention when running/building/modernizing a data center?
Just like you would expect your bank to be safe location to keep your money, so the owners of Data expect the Data Center to be safe and always functioning. Avoiding usage of fire supporting material like plastic or wood within the data center helps in eliminating threat from External or Internal Fire. Using fly-ash bricks for making the walls, vermiculite plaster, replacing paints with putty or using fire retardant paints, using fire retardant doors, coating the floor with nitrile rubber and avoiding window opening for the Data Center floor should be given maximum priority while building a new Data Center or upgrading your existing Data Center.

What is your recommendation for companies that have to decide whether building a new data center or modernizing their existing one? Is there a rough guide?

Data Centers should not be built to look like a Car showroom, but the methodology used to build a Data Center should be safety and availability of the Data. Data Center building should be built in a location which is not in highly active seismic zones. A data center building should be preferably sandwiched between 2 floors, this helps in reducing the sensible heat load transferred from the external atmosphere within the structure of the building and also reduces threat of flooding, which is a common threat for Data Centers built on ground level. External walls should be dual cavity walls made of fly-ash bricks, which have 3+ hours of fire rating. Vermiculite plaster should be applied on the ceiling, side walls as well as below the flooring. Use of plastic or wooden furniture should be strictly prohibited within a data center. Heat exchange technique with a nearby water body can save a lot of power for a Data Center, which is lost in cooling the IT equipment's and Non-IT equipment's. Roof of a Data Center should be utilized to deploy Solar panels which can provide power during day time or take care of the cooling requirements during the day time. Network Operations center should not be setup within the server room, as frequent human intervention can create problems for a data center.

Prasanth Menon
(prasanthm@cybermedia.co.in)