Andrew Colley | November 11, 2008
DATA centres are not much in the public eye. For many, the banks of server equipment and kilometres of cabling humming away in their gizzards, are not of great interest.
The global warming crisis has started to change that. Governments and communities are starting to wonder just how much energy these mysterious beasts devour, and the businesses that use them are wondering too.Fortunately, in this arena at least, the needs of environmentalists and industrialists neatly overlap, hosting centre giant Macquarie Telecom says.
In May 2007, when denial over global warming finally began to give way to muted panic and calls for action, Macquarie Telecom began seeking ways to make its data centre greener.
Macquarie Telecom hosting managing director Aidan Tudehope says there were at least three factors pushing the company down the green path.
"The first, obviously, is the financial element, because it makes sense to keep an eye on energy consumption and our carbon footprint. That's obvious and tangible.
"The second driver was corporate responsibility. It was right for us to do our bit for the environment.
"Thirdly, our customers were increasingly asking us what we were doing and they were also asking for help to reduce their own carbon footprint.
"For us to help our customers we needed to be several steps ahead of them," Tudehope says.
In May of last year, Macquarie Telecom approached the market to start a very complex process of taking vendor equipment to the test bench to see how it measured up against vendor claims.
Demystifying the range of marketing materials and vendor claims was the most difficult task, Tudehope says.
"The hardest element was sifting through the vendor hype on green IT.
"Every IT vendor has their own claim as to what their equipment can and can't do and how efficient it is versus its competitors.
"Everyone has a different benchmark and a different set of assumptions, and it's impossible to simply get vendors to provide clear comparisons," he says.
Macquarie Telecom found some of the assumptions vendors made simply didn't work in its large data centre.
The benchmarks and assumptions the vendors made in their labs didn't translate to a real production environment, he says.
"Given our scale, we can have vendors in identical environments next to each other and we can measure and monitor how they are performing. Based on that, we made some decisions as to which vendors to back," Tudehope says.
By November last year, the company had signed a contract with Sun Microsystems to progressively transform its entire data centre over the next three years. It wasn't until January, however, that the real work got under way.
Macquarie Telecom negotiated a deal that included strict performance criteria.
The hosting division insisted on ensuring metrics were in place before it let Sun through the door.
Because of the complexity of the centre, the task "took a while", Tudehope says.
He was unable to reveal the precise cost of the project because of difficulties breaking it out from ongoing operating costs.
However, he said, the equipment came at a premium.
"We cannot put an exact dollar amount on this investment in greening our data centre, as some of our expenditure would have been incurred as part of standard operating expenditure and capital expenditure to keep our data centre state of the art and remain compliant with international and local standards.
"The other costs are labour, which we have not separated.
"As a rough guide, though, equipment was the largest investment: green hardware, virtualisation software and data centre infrastructure often comes at a premium.
"For example, the new racks we've deployed with inbuilt monitoring technology are 50percent more expensive than the previous versions we had deployed across the data centre," he says.
The early results have been promising, Macquarie Telecom says.
The new system has already reduced its annual CO2 output by about 600 tonnes, while its server fleet has increased 30 per cent.
Its cooling power requirements are down 26 per cent.
The company will be changing out 40 per cent of its equipment every 12 months, and new customers will be fast-tracked on to the new equipment.
THE PROBLEM
The global warming crisis created an opportunity for Macquarie Telecom to cut its data centre's power consumption, reduce its carbon footprint and make it service more attractive to customers.
THE PROCESS
The company waded through reams of confusing green IT hype before signing a contract with Sun to change its server systems over three years.
THE RESULT
In six months using the new system the company has reduced carbon output by 600 tonnes a year despite a 30 per cent increase in the size of its server fleet.