LEED - Is it beneficial?

Increasing amounts of Data Centre operators in the United States are looking to get LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification on new Data Centre builds in an effort to reduce their carbon footprint. There are obvious advantages to creating a more sustainable building which conserves and/or generates its own power, but are all the LEED checklist points beneficial to the building of a new facility?

23% of the LEED checklist refers to the site chosen for building construction. The checklist covers areas such as the reduction of impact on the land, rehabilitating biodiversity and minimizing the effects on water flows and runoff. Although many of these site-related points can be achieved, the nature of Data Centres generally require them to be located close to, or in, a major town so as to avoid the huge cost of re-routing power and sourcing data connectivity. Urban sites are often limited and developers often do not have the space or money convert 50% of the land to promote biodiversity which is one of the LEED requirements.

Conforming to other sections is easier. There are recommendations on taking logical steps to reduce carbon emissions. Building in minimum levels of energy use in new devices by design can realise significant power reduction.

A major section is to demonstrate that a building will be more efficient than a normal building, scored on a percentage improvement on an incremental scale. It encourages improvements at every stage of the build to encourage the highest scores. The more efficient the building materials used, the more efficient the building will be.

A relatively small maximum score (6.3%) is awarded for the production of on-site renewable energy, which appears to recognise the fact that it is not feasible to produce off-grid energy in large quantities at this point in time. They also give points for sourcing grid power from a green source. Most electricity providers now supply, for a premium, energy produced sustainably using wind, wave, hydro and solar. Crucially, LEED promote building power metering - essential for a well run Data Centre. Only by monitoring and logging energy use can it be properly assessed. This provides the basic tool to make informed changes to reduce energy use.

So to answer the original question 'Is LEED beneficial to new Data entre construction?' the answer is.....it depends! The benefit of LEED accreditation must be balanced with return on investment. Many of the criteria for LEED compliance are industry best practice and should be followed as they will result in lower running costs. Other criteria may not be considered as essential, and with budgets being tight, this may mean that not enough points could be realised to obtain creditation.

There is also the issue of potential conflicts between LEED and meeting the requirements for a tiered facility, as defined by the Uptime Institute.

Companies will look at a return on investment when designing a new Computer Room or Data Centre. The benefit of LEED accreditation has to be weighed against cost. LEED best practice should however, be followed where possible.

Migration Solutions is a specialist Data Centre consultancy focused on improving data centre and computer room design. Migration Solutions is an active member of The Green Grid, the only UK accredited RIBA CPD Network Provider for data centre design and endorsers of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres. For more information visit www.migrationsolutions.com or call 0845 251 2255.

Free Cooling Calculation

Free cooling has been around for a significant amount of time and many data centre managers are choosing to, at the end of its practical life, replace their current cooling plant with equipment that takes advantage of free cooling technologies. In smaller data centres where IT is a support tool and not the core business, data centre managers often find it difficult to persuade the people who hold the purse strings that it is better to spend a little more money now and make large savings down the line.

The Green Grid, campaigners for more efficient data centres, have developed a tool to help data centre managers to justify the extra capex when replacing the cooling plant. Their calculator 'The Free Cooling Tool' takes into account your data centres country, location within that country and all of your cooling and power use thresholds and combines this information with the cost of power to estimate the savings possible from replacing your current equipment with a free cooling type.

With this tool, the Green Grid hope to assist the world in making data centres as green as possible and to reduce their global carbon footprint. The net result is that you can help save your company money, while saving the environment and improving your facility.

Migration Solutions are specialist data centre consultants and members of the Green Grid. Being vendor independent allows them recommend free cooling equipment that will not only be the best available on the market, but best for you and your data centre or computer room. For more information visit www.migrationsolutions.com

PUE, DCiE, what’s it all about?

PUE is a metric developed by The Green Grid to measure Power Usage Effectiveness, which compares the total facility power usage against the IT power load. DCiE (Data Centre infrastructure Efficiency) is simply the inverse of PUE reported as a percentage. What do these figures actually tell us? They give a snap shot in time of a data centre or computer room's power use which can be used to suggest how efficiently your data centre's plant equipment is running. One of the main problems with PUE and DCiE is that the results tend to vary depending on the weather conditions at that particular moment in time. For example, if you took PUE measurements at 6am and again at 2pm, the difference in outside temperature and humidity would affect how hard your plant would have to work. A higher outside temperature requires air conditioning chillers to work harder to cool the same load, which has a significant impact on power usage. To make effective use of PUE and DCiE, reading need to be taken regularly to get an averaged result.

OK, so now we are in recession. There are, and will be more, calls for spending cuts and more efficiency from existing hardware and our staff. PUE and DCiE can play an important part in this. But where to start? As we are talking data centres, look at the power consumption. Or more accurately, look to see if you can look at the power consumption. It is amazing how many data centres and computer rooms, even the new builds don’t have metering installed to monitor power consumption. Data centres are estimated to contribute 3% of the CO2 emissions globally, yet the vast majority of data centre managers have no idea how much energy their facility consumes – let alone where to start making savings.

How do you get on with your company’s Facilities Manager? Putting that aside, it’s imperative that there is a good working relationship between these vastly important departments (IT and Facilities) as these two hold the key to reducing energy consumption, and therefore costs, more than any other department. Look at it from the Facility’s Managers point of view. He has little if any impact on what is installed in the data centre. All he or she will see is the monthly or quarterly electricity bills coming in with little idea of where to reduce costs, or indeed, where the costs are coming from. Keeping him/her in the picture is incredibly important. Working together to install electricity meters to enable the PUE and DCiE to be calculated and logged on a regular basis is a start. It is also imperative to log your consumption regularly by taking meter readings and trending the power usage, what impacts it and what changes it.

How much will you save by installing this meters? Without proper metering, who knows?

Migration Solutions is a member of The Green Grid which is focused on advancing efficiency in data centres. They have also recently received Information Age's award for Best Data Centre Innovation 2008 for ERA - an Environmental Report and Audit which aims to help data centre owners to save money and the environment with no or little financial outlay.