Green Computing, and Green Hosting in Australian Data Centers

There is a very important factor that we at BlueCentral are in wild agreement with our customers and suppliers – that we wish to minimise our Carbon Footprint and any negative effect on the environment as much as possible. This is the true age of Green IT and Green Data Centers. Within Data Centres, this is a real challenge, for the simple reason that they utilise a large amount of electricity. So here is what we have done to date:

Purchasing from Green-IT-Aware Suppliers

We have approached our suppliers and discussed their plans and commitment to reduce power usage on the devices we buy from them. For example, Dell has been instrumental in increasing the efficiency of the Power Supplies in their servers, thus saving power and reducing impact on the environment. The same can be said for Intel, where they are reducing the power used in their processors, both to reduce cost and increase performance, at the same time a good thing for our environment. Even the software and storage companies are in this, including key suppliers to us such as EMC, Microsoft and VMware.

Conforming to the Green Grid PUE and IT Awareness Program

In 2007, a co-operative organisation was formed in the USA, called The Green Grid, by green IT aware companies and individuals. You can find them at www.thegreengrid.org . All BlueCentral's major suppliers are members and some are on the Board of this organisation. They include EMC, VMware, Dell, Microsoft and Intel. The Green Grid came up with a measure of the effectiveness of Data Centres, called the PUE ratio, standing for Power Usage Effectiveness to measure DCE (Data Centre Efficiency). In essence, the PUE ratio measures the comparative performance of the equipment we host, with the power used to run the centre for cooling and lighting. A lower number is better. The older data centres that are built in established buildings typically have a PUE ratio greater than 1.8 up to an incredible 2.5 or more.

Hosting within PUE Aware Green Data Centres

BlueCentral’s Green IT Direction (GID) has been not only host in purpose built PUE aware data centres, which are full or nearly full (so that the PUE is most efficient). A good example is our use of the data centre at North Ryde where the PUE is below 1.6, compared to some data centres in older warehouses or multi-story buildings where achieving a low PUE is very difficult. Details of our green hosting services can be found here.

Data Centre Design and a Green Server Farm

BlueCentral is also very interested and concerned for the design of green data centers and the layout of the racking. The older style was to cool the entire data centre area. If you are in a “cold”data centre then its almost certainly an in-efficient one. Our modern designs are rapidly moving to closed racks, with cooling air being pressured through the  plenum and directly into the racks themselves. This is far more efficient.

Lately, we have also moved away from “per-RU” co-location hosting, so that we can enclose the co-located equipment more efficiently. In August 2010, we undertook a review of all our co-location customer installations and commenced a major re-configuration, for more effective cooling, more reliable communication and higher availability for our customers.  We have also moved to hot and cold aisle configurations which are decidedly more efficient.

Green IT for high performance Customer Hosting & Grid Computing

Some of our customers have asked to use a larger quantity of power for each rack, as they have condensed their installations, to take full advantage of server virtualisation. In doing this, we have supplied new specialty racks, that include in-rack cooling systems, in some cased creating a very efficient pod hosting arrangement. While the initial installation costs are a little higher, the customer obtains the benefit of higher performance and reliability and we all gain the benefits of lower carbon emissions. A Win-win for all!

For more information about BlueCentral's Green IT Strategy contact us on 1300 258 323 or complete the enquiry form to your right and one of our service consultants will contact you shortly.