Greening ICT Programme (with JISC)

The challenge of this particular project is to improve on what is already two reasonably efficient “data centre” computer rooms (with power utilization efficiency, or PUE, of 1.52 and 1.32), and perhaps influencing other “data centres” to adopt any improvements we can establish.

Working within Facilities Management I’m learning a lot about how such facilities function and their potential influencing factors, but one single fact suprises me and it is this:
We have a central “data centre” facility which is well supported, backed-up, environmentally controlled with excellent support staff, and this must be the most efficient, sustainable and cost effective approach to managing large quantities of data storage or processing, yet there is still a myriad of smaller “data farms”, “clusters”, which academic groups maintain, scattered around our College buildings. Such facilities require local focused cooling, additional maintenance and support, surely this doesn’t make sense and is certainly not the most efficient and sustainable solution!

Read Kevin Cope, Head of Building Operations at Imperial College, shares his thoughts: in full

To start with the project we should establish a baseline and make an assessment of available options:

Two Imperial College computer rooms, which host around 2,500 servers for Imperial College London, Natural History Museum, Royal College of Music and Janet-LMN point-of-presence, consume about 7,500 MWh annually at a cost of around £500,000. Computer rooms housed in a traditional 1960’s building and there are design considerations and constraints to be taken into account. There is also a computer room in level 2 of Huxley which is assumed to consume around a third of the energy of the Mechanical Engineering computer rooms but this room is out of scope for the project.

Virtualisation has helped to contain the growth in power consumption of Business servers but step changes in adding more High-Performance modules and Research servers resulted in a steady increase. Here is the graph to show number of computer rooms server units (includes High-Performance modules, Research and Business servers):

We would be looking at 5% reduction of annual energy consumption through the use of the following options, or their combination:

• Organise “cold aisles” and evacuation of hot air from “hot spots”
• Energy recovery system, free cooling
• Temperature adjustment of computer room AC units
• Adjustment of other parameters of AC units
• Smaller UPS unit
• Improved solar radiation control (windows films/coating)
• Improved air/coolant flow (filters, fans, pipes, ducts and ductwork)
• Improved lighting control (to be able to switch on and off selected areas only)
• Improved energy efficiency of lighting devices themselves
• Electrical mains transformer efficiency improvement
• Mains voltage adjustment (if feasible)

We believe those marked in blue should be looked at in more detail and assessed first. We would like a payback within 3 years which sets the total budget for the project to around £90,000 which includes £22,350 of JISC funding.

Read Where do we start? in full