Environment - Green Issues

The truth of the matter is datacentres don't really appear to be very attractive in the green stakes. However this is a misconception easily rectified when you scratch beneath the surface.

Systems that are housed in city office blocks are routinely supported by cooling equipment that is inefficient. Placing equipment in a datacentre consolidates the heating/cooling issue into one location that has specialised environmental equipment tailored to efficiently maintaining the correct temperature. It is this consolidation that brings about efficiencies which in turn offset the environmental impact.

City offices spend almost 35% of their energy bill heating the environment whilst spending more energy trying to cool down the areas hosting computer equipment. Datacentres only use energy cooling the air temperature down and much of that cooling comes from the external cold air (particularly good in Scotland!!).

Datacentres utilise a technique known as "free air" cooling where the ambient temperatures outside are used to reduce the temperature inside the datacentre. Only when internal temperatures rise beyond a particular level or the outside temperature rises too high does the refrigerant system kick in, which of course uses more energy than the free-air method, but is still highly efficient in these concentrated situations. Free-air systems are expensive and are rarely found in office environments.

In addition datacentres are using more sophisticated cooling technologies on high-power devices such as SANs and Blade servers. These devices when implemented in an office IT room environment put a significant strain on traditional office cooling equipment.

For further information please contact us.