Macquarie Telecom shaves 6% off power bill in 2 months
By looking closely at the power consumption of its data centres and identifying measures to better manage energy use, Macquirie Telecom has achieved measurable results following the implementation of green initiatives in its facilities.
“We’ve been looking at how our operations are performed and how we can improve them from an energy efficiency perspective – our key focus has been on understanding where the power is going and why,” says Aidan Tudehope, managing director, Hosting, Macquarie Telecom. “Based on the results of our measurement, we essentially created a list of things we’d change and improve in the data centre and have gone about gradually making these changes. Each change is monitored so we can assess the impact, and those that are effective in improving energy efficiency or reducing energy consumption have been adopted as best practice.”
According to Tudehope, simple measures that require very little extra investment have already started to yield results.
“In just two months, we’ve managed to reduce our power consumption bill by six per cent in the Intellicentre. This was through simple actions related to how we manage cooling of the data centre in particular. Simple steps like making sure there were no open floor tiles in the data centre allowing cool air to be pumped into areas that didn’t need to be cooled take effect very quickly.”
COSTS OF METERING
While saving energy saves money, going green doesn’t come without some initial costs, especially with existing facilities such as Macquirie’s Intellicentre in Sydney.
“There was definitely a cost incurred on our behalf in this process – a mixture of labour costs and equipment costs when you break it down,” Tudehope said. “The process of setting up the metering and measuring points across the Intellicentre was a cost for example. When we built the data centre six years ago there was no apparent need to meter so installing hundreds of these measurement points across the Intellicentre now has had a cost attached.”
Tudehope added however, that many of the actions taken to actually reduce energy consumption were free. “It’s been about smarter practices and better approaches taken in response to the findings.”
COMPETITIVE EDGE
The good news is that customers in Australia are increasingly looking at green solutions and partners who can help them through the greening of the corporate infrastructure.
“As a rule, green our own data centre is becoming more and more of a competitive advantage in the market,” Tudehope said. “As customers increasingly seek out technology partners that share the same CSR and environmental goals as themselves we are seeing this as a key driver in the purchase decision process for some customers.”
In Australia, the market remains a “mixed bag,” with large corporations and government departments now putting emphasis on green credentials in tender documents while mainstream businesses showing desire but less commitment.
SUN CHOICE
Following the initial steps to optimise its facility, Macquirie is now planning to tackle energy consumption of the core infrastructure of servers, switches, firewalls and air conditioning, which now make up over 85% of the total cost of operation. In December, Macquirie announced the selection of Sun Microsystems as its preferred data centre supplier.
“Sun Microsystems has made an investment in building ‘green servers’ that are smarter in their use of energy and have less impact on the environment. Idle processors consume power; and between the hours of 1am – 6am most corporate server processors are idle. Sun Microsystems has taken this insight and, in response, developed servers that use less power when processors are actually idle, for example, its Sun x64 servers,” Tudehope continued.
“This move is expected initially to improve efficiency of the data centre energy consumption by more than 650,000 KW per year. This equates to over 600 tonnes of CO2 emissions, according to Energy Australia calculations so we’re on the path to greater improvements in future.”
GETTING THE MOST OUT OF GREEN PRODUCTS
Many vendors have issued claims of ‘green’ products, but it is not always easy to achieve those promised benefits. Macquirie has developed a three-step process starting with developing an understanding of the power metrics of the facilities, working with vendors to ensure that equipment matches requirements and is deployed under the ideal conditions, and finally, maintain monitoring and measurement of the equipment once they are deployed.
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Category: Data centres
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