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Real Innovation - Building Canada's largest green data centre | November 17, 2008
By Danny Bradbury
The early adopters in the green data centre market are generally companies that operate and run the facilities as their core source of revenue. In Canada, data centre firm RackForce is working with IBM on a new facility called gigaCentre, based in Kelowna, B.C.
Although RackForce’s customer base is worldwide, “we also started to see a lot more localized demand from people across the country who wanted a safe place to put their equipment,” said RackForce vice-president Brian Fry. This was especially true of B.C. companies, who were worried about using data centres near the San Andreas fault.
IBM had already identified Kelowna as a particularly suitable place for data centre location before it began working with RackForce. Being close to water in a cool climate and away from the wildfire-prone territory often found in the province’s interior made the location a low-risk, low-overhead affair. Also, the facility was a new one, which gave RackForce more energy efficiency options. It is easier to build efficiencies into data centres designed from the ground up than it is to retrofit existing centres with green modifications.
But the company didn’t build the facility entirely from scratch. Instead, it decided to use a 20-year-old manufacturing plant as the shell for its construction. “Building a new building takes a lot of emissions,” said Rick Ellery, territory services leader for B.C. at IBM Canada, who is working on the project with RackForce. “By working with an existing building, we’re able to use recycled or lower grade materials and avoid using the high-end wood products that are becoming threatened in our forests.”
RackForce is kitting out the building as a 150,000-square-foot data centre using the modular approach pioneered by IBM. “The beauty of this model is that we can build on demand,” Fry said. “With most centres like this, on day one you’re cooling this complete, massive space. This is modular, so we only cool what we have to cool. Our expenses and costs are much lower.”
The company included a range of innovations in the data centre’s construction, including reducing the length of high voltage cables to increase efficiency, and placing uninterruptible power supplies directly in the rack instead of in more centralized locations. Those racks of servers were also turned sideways, so that cooling air passed over a shorter distance from side to side rather than from front to back, which made the cooling process more efficient. Variable speed motors were put on all of the air pumps to avoid expending too much energy on pumping when it wasn’t necessary, and the company also relied heavily on cold-aisle containment.
“You put doors and a ceiling in front of two rows of cabinets to enclose them, so that cool air from the underfloor is pulled through the equipment and the warmer air is exhausted out of the back,” Ellery said. “That only cools certain rows of equipment that need the higher capacity.”
Perhaps one of the most significant parts of the data centre’s operation is the source of that cool air. Instead of relying entirely on energy-intensive air conditioning systems, the facility will use external air as much as possible. Cold air is drawn from the outside of the building and removes heat from inside the facility via heat exchangers. Thanks to Canada’s cooler climate, RackForce believes it can use this technique, known as free-air cooling, for seven or eight months of the year.
Canada’s cooler climate isn’t the only thing that makes it an attractive site for data centres. Fry said its abundant water supply and hydroelectric energy make certain parts of the country much more environmentally friendly sources of energy in terms of carbon emissions. “We found that the Yukon, Vermont, Quebec and B.C. sit by far at the lowest,” he said, arguing that whereas energy from coal-fired plants creates more than a thousand grams of carbon per kilowatt hour, hydropower produces about 10 grams.
The first phase of the data centre won’t be completed until December, but IBM has already crunched the numbers to come up with an efficiency rating. It uses the power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating from the Green Grid consortium, which measures the ratio between the energy needed for the data centre and the energy used to run the equipment within it. The data centre will have a PUE rating of 1.38, meaning that the facility will need 1.38 watts of electricity for every watt used to power the IT equipment. The ideal is a PUE rating of 1.0, although this is impossible to attain in real-world conditions.
When both IBM and major data centre players such as RackForce start pinpointing areas in Canada as low-risk, low-cost areas for data centre production, it represents an opportunity for the country to reinvent itself as a green computing location.
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The early adopters in the green data centre market are generally companies that operate and run the facilities as their core source of revenue. In Canada, data centre firm RackForce is working with IBM on a new facility called gigaCentre, based in Kelowna, B.C.
Although RackForce’s customer base is worldwide, “we also started to see a lot more localized demand from people across the country who wanted a safe place to put their equipment,” said RackForce vice-president Brian Fry. This was especially true of B.C. companies, who were worried about using data centres near the San Andreas fault.
IBM had already identified Kelowna as a particularly suitable place for data centre location before it began working with RackForce. Being close to water in a cool climate and away from the wildfire-prone territory often found in the province’s interior made the location a low-risk, low-overhead affair. Also, the facility was a new one, which gave RackForce more energy efficiency options. It is easier to build efficiencies into data centres designed from the ground up than it is to retrofit existing centres with green modifications.
But the company didn’t build the facility entirely from scratch. Instead, it decided to use a 20-year-old manufacturing plant as the shell for its construction. “Building a new building takes a lot of emissions,” said Rick Ellery, territory services leader for B.C. at IBM Canada, who is working on the project with RackForce. “By working with an existing building, we’re able to use recycled or lower grade materials and avoid using the high-end wood products that are becoming threatened in our forests.”
RackForce is kitting out the building as a 150,000-square-foot data centre using the modular approach pioneered by IBM. “The beauty of this model is that we can build on demand,” Fry said. “With most centres like this, on day one you’re cooling this complete, massive space. This is modular, so we only cool what we have to cool. Our expenses and costs are much lower.”
The company included a range of innovations in the data centre’s construction, including reducing the length of high voltage cables to increase efficiency, and placing uninterruptible power supplies directly in the rack instead of in more centralized locations. Those racks of servers were also turned sideways, so that cooling air passed over a shorter distance from side to side rather than from front to back, which made the cooling process more efficient. Variable speed motors were put on all of the air pumps to avoid expending too much energy on pumping when it wasn’t necessary, and the company also relied heavily on cold-aisle containment.
“You put doors and a ceiling in front of two rows of cabinets to enclose them, so that cool air from the underfloor is pulled through the equipment and the warmer air is exhausted out of the back,” Ellery said. “That only cools certain rows of equipment that need the higher capacity.”
Perhaps one of the most significant parts of the data centre’s operation is the source of that cool air. Instead of relying entirely on energy-intensive air conditioning systems, the facility will use external air as much as possible. Cold air is drawn from the outside of the building and removes heat from inside the facility via heat exchangers. Thanks to Canada’s cooler climate, RackForce believes it can use this technique, known as free-air cooling, for seven or eight months of the year.
Canada’s cooler climate isn’t the only thing that makes it an attractive site for data centres. Fry said its abundant water supply and hydroelectric energy make certain parts of the country much more environmentally friendly sources of energy in terms of carbon emissions. “We found that the Yukon, Vermont, Quebec and B.C. sit by far at the lowest,” he said, arguing that whereas energy from coal-fired plants creates more than a thousand grams of carbon per kilowatt hour, hydropower produces about 10 grams.
The first phase of the data centre won’t be completed until December, but IBM has already crunched the numbers to come up with an efficiency rating. It uses the power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating from the Green Grid consortium, which measures the ratio between the energy needed for the data centre and the energy used to run the equipment within it. The data centre will have a PUE rating of 1.38, meaning that the facility will need 1.38 watts of electricity for every watt used to power the IT equipment. The ideal is a PUE rating of 1.0, although this is impossible to attain in real-world conditions.
When both IBM and major data centre players such as RackForce start pinpointing areas in Canada as low-risk, low-cost areas for data centre production, it represents an opportunity for the country to reinvent itself as a green computing location.
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