Server Rooms: Going Green and Saving Green – Part II
By Matt Newstrom, Senior Advisor
In Part I, I discussed a CresaPartners client, PECI, and how it applied progressive energy conservation strategies to its server room. In this entry, we will look at the third and fourth strategies.
Strategy Three – Air-side Economizer
By definition, an air-side economizer is “a mechanical device used to reduce energy consumption. Economizers recycle energy produced within a system or leverage environmental temperature differences to achieve efficiency improvements.” Since PECI both raised the approved temperature set-point to 85 degrees and confined, redirected, and used the heat load created by the servers, it was able to use the ambient office air to “cool” its server equipment. This means that as long as the building’s central plant is conditioning the office space (Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. – 6 p.m.), PECI will be in effect getting “free cooling” for its server room. So, by doing simple math, there are 8,760 hours in a year, and for about 2,600 of those hours, the building is being controlled for occupant use and will be well under PECI’s 85 degree allowable operating temperature.
Outside the normal “occupied” hours in most buildings, the building systems typically will go into cooling mode on nights and weekends when the indoor temperature reaches the mid-80s (some buildings may let their temperatures float up from there, some below). While PECI’s installation is new, and over the next year, hard data will be collected through its energy monitoring system, it is expected the company will only need to rely on supplemental cooling on nights and weekends in the summer months, if at all.
Strategy Four – TIMING!!
I put TIMING in all caps since all of the strategies listed above will be much more difficult to achieve if you wait until your new building is selected, the lease is signed, and the construction documents are at 90%. If you wait until the lease is signed, then you are already behind the eight-ball and can miss out on opportunities that exist during the negotiation phase. In the case of PECI, we spent many hours upfront and even before touring prospective buildings, documenting the requirements and goals of the project beyond the basic questions about “how much space do we lease, and what is the cost per foot?”
The project used an integrated team approach in which we engaged engineers, project management consultants, PECI staff, and the landlord early to gain consensus on what the limitations and opportunities were. Getting an early start on the server room design (as well as other energy-saving initiatives) allowed us to locate the server room in the optimal location of the building and leverage landlord funds to cover the additional costs associated with the build and the other energy-saving tenant improvements.
While not all engineers and IT experts will always agree with some of these ideas and practices, the point is that the problem of excessive energy usage in call centers and server rooms needs a solution, and rethinking “the norm” is what each of us needs to be doing to raise the bar.
Tags: corporate real estate, data center, energy conservation, green, server room, sustainable
This entry was posted on Friday, March 4th, 2011 at 7:00 am and is filed under Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.