Enterprises Need To Adopt Holistic Perspective For DC Efficiency

Biztech2.0 caught up with Divyesh Shah, country director, Systems Engineering, Sun Microsystems India, to understand better the dynamics of the green sphere.

What steps can enterprises take to become energy efficient?

Enterprises need to take a diagonal view of activities within a data centre. If you look at the challenges that enterprises are currently facing, they stem mainly from power, space and cooling. The question that arises then is ‘how do you ensure that you are taking care of all these factors?’ Energy efficiency is about processors, the memory being used, the virtualisation layer, the operating system, the network, and management of the whole data centre. Enterprises cannot look at just one aspect if they really want to be eco-friendly and have an efficient data centre. Thought then has to devoted to make each of these divisions energy efficient and again we are not only talking about hardware here but also software and services.

How energy efficient are Indian enterprises?

For quite some time in India, enterprises were energy efficient in certain aspects. One of the aspects of energy efficiency deals with the utilisation of your own systems. In India, the utilisation of servers for example, would be around 80-85 percent, meaning that we are quite energy efficient and are only wasting 15 percent. In that aspect, Indian companies have been quite energy efficient. Currently, I don’t think Indian enterprises are looking at energy efficiency in detail and one of the reasons for this could also be cost.

More from Biztech

Future Group - Reliance Retail Deal approved by CCI RBI ban on cryptocurrencies takes effect; prohibition could force investors to tap the black market

When you look at the cost of being energy efficient, versus the cost that you are currently incurring, the current cost may seem to be more affordable in the short term as opposed to being energy efficient. As things change and power becomes more expensive, you will see more organisations leaning towards energy efficiency. Enterprises need to start thinking about thin clients where there are no moving parts. There is nothing in there that consumes energy unless and until you actually use it. Even when energy is being consumed, it is minimal.

What kind of data centre designs are Indian enterprises looking at?

One major trend that has been observed is that of co-host facilities or facilities where somebody else is hosting the data centre. The advantage with this is that there is somebody else managing the data centre and taking care of all its problems. There are also standards that are available in data centre designs. There are companies that offer consulting services to actually create such designs but I’m not sure if organisations are opting for those services yet. This is something that facilities still do; they raise the floor, give the amount of space that is needed and provide the cooling requirements.

One of the things that Sun Microsystems has done is the creation of a state-of-the-art data centre in Bangalore. The unique thing about this data centre is that it is a completely modular architecture. Some of the things that we’ve done there are very specific to India. We realised that we did not need a raised floor anymore and opted for a hot and cold aisle. What this means is that the server farms actually face back-to-back, meaning that heat is generated in just one aisle. In front of the servers or storage boxes, no heat is generated. Therefore, there can be a hot aisle, which is the back of the server and only that needs to be cooled instead of the entire data centre resulting in reduction of power consumption.

While building this, we actually thought about the infrastructure challenges that we would face with regard to availability of cold water or electricity on a 24/7 basis.

Moving on, we took certain steps with our UPS to monitor things so that turning on and off certain equipment could be done on the fly by ways of creating air-conditioning units and de-humidifiers with an IP or a connection where heat can be monitored remotely.