Disaster Solutions Management
 

Our Carbon Footprint

What is a Carbon Footprint?

A Carbon Footprint is a gauge of the impact of human activities on the environment in terms of the amount of green house gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide.

Power consumption. principally electricity and gas, and travel are the major contributors to a carbon footprint.

Why is important?

CO2 is a greenhouse gas - these are the major contributors to global warming.

Don’t you use a lot of power?

Hosting computer servers can use a lot of power. This is due to the design and manufacture of these machines.. There’s little we can do about this – it’s a ‘given’. The companies that design and build these machines are $ multi-billion ones. It requires huge resources to design and build processors and associated equipment.

The market demands more speed, more power and greater processing capacity. Manufacturers are aware of the strain, limitations and environmental impacts and are researching more efficient solutions.

In the intervening period, what we can do is minimise the impact of these technologies by careful use of design, resources and our skill-sets.

Not all 'gloom and doom'

It’s not all ‘gloom and doom’ – powerful hosting makes it easier to work from home and can cut out travel to meetings through e-conferencing, webinars and remote access.

It's also far more efficient to host servers together. Take something as simple as Uninterruptible Power Supplies for example; a single server unit may be circa 80% efficient, one capable of powering a server room though can be 95%+ efficient. What's more these larger units have better battery management - significantly extending the life of these and further reducing environmental impacts.

Our carbon incentive

Our carbon footprint is very good for our type of business. There’s a great incentive for every hosting, disaster recovery and workplace recovery centre to minimise its power use. This is simple; if the centre needs to utilise its independent resilient power facilities (generators), then a low carbon footprint means that it can do so for longer on a given quantity of generator diesel. It also means that its possible to run more server computers on any given generator capacity.

How we’ve minimised our carbon footprint

Energy efficiency has been ‘designed in’ to our facility. The original building is a 1940’s aircraft hangar and added to the complexity was a desire to retain as much of the original look as possible.

Insulation

  • Minimal glass area, double glazed windows with thermal glass (laminated for security reasons).
  • External roof insulation that is unobtrusive and thermally efficient.
  • ‘skin’ insulation on the internal building structure.

Heating & Cooling

Highly efficient air-conditioning;
  • On the lower floor 'inverter' aircon - typically 50% more efficient than older designs
  • On the upper floor, evaporative cooling that uses a 10th of the power of 'traditional' systems

Lighting

  • Low energy light-bulbs wherever possible
  • Infra-red switching for lighting in toilet/cloakroom areas
  • IR camera driven external night lighting
Lighting only comes on when people are present – this cuts waste and light pollution

Equipment

  • Low energy PCs – we have hundreds - low energy consumption was part of the purchase specification
  • A low energy telephone system
Our workplace recovery seat power consumption is less than 500VA per user. Typical offices run on 1,000 VA to 1.5 KVA per user.

Server hosting

Server hosting is complex. Typically 90%+ of the energy (electricity) that goes into a computer server comes out as heat. As 55% of server failures are caused by heat, removing this heat is important to efficiency 'up-time' and life span. However, not only is that heat wasted energy, but the process of removing the heat requires power.

The 'rule of thumb' in hosting is that for every KVA of power required for a server rack, the same power is required to remove heat. We don't accept this logic.

Our objectives are:

A) To recover and reuse as much heat as possible where economically feasible

B) To minimise the energy used in cooling

In a data centre power consumption (and thus heat generation) can vary hugely from cabinet to cabinet and by time of day. A cabinet full of networking equipment may draw less than a kilowatt of energy. Ambient cooling, I.E. cooling the room, is an efficient means of dealing with this type of heat.

However, a  Blade Server in an adjacent cabinet may vary its power consumption from 2KVA to 32KVA by time of day. Most of this energy will transfer into heat. In the blade server scenario, at full power, that’s more heat than 32 single bar electric fires in less than 1 sq metre of floor space.

The prevailing method of dissipating that heat is to cool the cabinet. This concept is sound, but using air-conditioning for this simply doubles the power requirement. At DSM we find this unacceptable.

Water is 3,500 times more efficient as a conductor of heat than air. The problem with water cooling is that it requires plumbing, and the introduction of water into a server room. Happily at DSM we’ve designed this capability in. We also have extensive ground – 4.5 acres, which allows us to adapt the most efficient cooling methodologies – evaporative cooling and natural heat sinks.

Our current project involves the installation of this solution, complete with heat recovery during winter – further reducing the impact of our already efficient heating systems. Our objective is to save 25% costs over more orthodox methodologies. As cooling represents 20-40% of a Hosting Centre’s power consumption this makes us more efficient, more competitive and more profitable.

A Low Carbon Footprint Pays!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

www.disaster-recovery.co.uk