Case study: How Advania maintains a low PUE in the Icelandic datacentre
Thursday, March 7th, 2013When Advania Data Centres wanted to build an environmentally-friendly and cost-effective IT
facility, it comparison Iceland as a location, both for a country’s ambient cool
temperature and a geothermal energy.
Today, Advania’s Icelandic datacentre has a PUE of
1.16, that many European organisations can usually dream of.
Nordic IT services association Advania got into a datacentre business when it acquired Thor Data
Center in Reykjavík. Since a merger in 2011, Advania has been regulating and handling a Thor
datacentre.
The datacentre site now contains dual modular datacentre
containers, though has room to accommodate 4 some-more containers. Unlike normal datacentres,
which come with their possess array of complexities, customisations and considerations, a modular
datacentre is a pre-configured datacentre-in-a-box that can be ecstatic and set adult anywhere in
the universe where there are cooling comforts and a connectivity network.
With Visa and Opera Software as a biggest open clients, some-more than 44 million users go
through Advania’s Icelandic datacentre each day.
Keeping datacentre appetite mandate low
One datacentre enclosure is exclusively for one of a customers, Opera Software. “Opera wanted
an individual, private, cloud-like set-up, and it runs a lot of CPU-intensive applications, so we
have one whole modular
datacentre dedicated to Opera,” says Benedikt Grondal, arch record officer of a Advania
Thor datacentre.
The appetite mandate for a trickery dedicated to Opera are aloft too, he says. The Opera
datacentre processes about 20Tbit of information per second and needs 14KwH of cooling capacity.
The other enclosure is used to offer other customers, including Visa, UK educational institutions
such as a Hertford Regional College, and some internal companies. This trickery requires 8KwH of
cooling power.
The company’s datacentre trickery uses
outside atmosphere for cooling and draws on Iceland’s geothermal energy to appetite a servers and other
equipment.
Half of a datacentre’s appetite is used for cooling. “With giveaway atmosphere cooling, we cut a appetite use
by half, saving a lot of money,” says Advania’s Kolbeinn Einarsson.
According to some experts, datacentre operators over-cool
their infrastructure, that creates it energy-inefficient. Each increasing grade in temperature
requires reduction cooling, so reduction appetite is needed, creation a datacentre some-more energy-efficient and
slashing appetite bills for a enterprise.
Advania keeps a feverishness during around 20-21ºC, rather than sub-20ºC. In addition, a Advania
Thor datacentre site uses surreptitious giveaway atmosphere cooling. “We have feverishness exchangers and atmosphere filters that
help us control a steam and a atmosphere quality,” says Grondal. Purer atmosphere and tranquil humidity
also safeguard longevity of a servers, he adds.
Even if atmosphere is during a feverishness suitable for cooling, it still has to be treated
to safeguard a right humidity and filtered to locate particulates that could means problems in
the datacentre. For instance, a high dampness turn in a atmosphere can lead to decrease of some
metals in a server units, while atmosphere that is too dry can lead to issues with immobile electricity,
as good as a expansion of dendrites.
Iceland’s renewable appetite is slot and environmentally-friendly
But since did Advania select Iceland for a datacentres?
“We could have selected Sweden, that also offers giveaway atmosphere cooling and meets many of a needs,
but Iceland was a usually one charity us renewable appetite in a form of hydro and geothermal
energy,” says Einarsson.
Using renewables to appetite a datacentre brings down a cost serve since it is cheaper than
electricity constructed in a rest of Europe regulating other means, such as chief appetite plants.
“The appetite prices in Iceland were another large cause that slanted us in foster of Iceland,” says
Einarsson. It is probable to close appetite prices for a 15-year duration in Iceland.
“On a contrary, appetite prices in Europe are constantly rising by about 20% each year. If we
were to build a same datacentre in a UK, it would have cost 30-50% more, and it wouldn’t be as
green as it is now.”
While a datacentre has a power
usage efficacy (PUE) of 1.16, potency could be serve softened if use of the
datacentre space was optimised.
Individual containers have a reduce PUE, though a altogether datacentre is still not full to
capacity, so a lot of cooling is squandered on dull space, according to Grondal. When Advania adds
more datacentre containers, a PUE will come down even further, he says.
PUE, combined by a members of The
Green Grid, is a metric used to establish a energy
efficiency of a datacentre. It is
calculated by dividing a sum appetite used opposite a whole of a datacentre by a volume of
energy used to appetite a IT equipment.
The Uptime
Institute estimates that many comforts could grasp 1.6 PUE regulating a many efficient
equipment and best practices. But a attention normal PUE of datacentres in a UK is around 2 to
2.2.
Advania’s Icelandic datacentre is a Tier 3
datacentre. The tiered system, grown by a Uptime Institute, offers companies a approach to
measure lapse on investment and performance. The standards are comprised of a four-tiered scale,
with Tier 4 being a many robust. “It is so fit that we call it Tier 3+,” says
Einarsson.
Article source: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240179213/Case-study-How-Advania-maintains-a-low-PUE-in-its-Icelandic-datacentre
A flourishing series of European firms are shortening their costs and their CO footprints by outsourcing their IT to datacentres in Iceland, it has been claimed.

Ship us some-more modules!
