2 November 2008

Carrie Higbie, global director of data centre solutions and services at Siemon, explains that IT can be both green and cost-efficient.

In a recent study, Gartner revealed that IT activity accounts for two per cent of global CO2 emissions, equivalent to the amount produced by the aviation industry.

The drive to reduce emissions and other environmental harm from ‘hidden’ activities such as IT has spawned a number of international efforts. The most wide-reaching initiatives are focused on ‘green buildings’ – efforts to reduce the environmental impact of commercial and residential spaces. The World Green Building Council now has ten member nations, with more likely to follow.

The initial focus is on renewable energy sources, power and energy savings, and environmental protection of sites for new and existing buildings. But further examination indicates that network cabling and infrastructure will impact the overall effort.

Energy conservation efforts are being introduced into the data centre space at an ever-increasing rate with good reason. Current studies show that power alone represents from 30 per cent to 50 per cent of overall data centre budgets. While a portion of the energy is consumed by the actual servers, switches, routers and other active gear, an additional power load is needed to cool this equipment.

In order to have the most efficient cooling, cabling must be properly designed and routed to allow the air to flow in an unobstructed manner. TIA-942 and other complimentary data centre standards around the globe suggest that horizontal and vertical cabling be run to accommodate growth, so that these areas do not need to be revisited. There are several reasons for this recommendation, including eliminating the adverse effects of removing floor tiles during moves, adds and changes (MAC) work – which can decrease static pressure under raised floors, negatively affecting cooling efficiency – and assuring that pathway fill ratios will allow the flow of cold air in cold aisles to be unobstructed by cabling.

A significant number of older data centres and even telecommunications areas have suffered from ill-managed MACs over the years, leaving abandoned cabling channels behind. These often create air dams which obstruct air flow, potentially resulting in higher energy consumption as cooling equipment works less efficiently. There may also be issues with the older cabling jackets not meeting current Reduction of Hazardous Substances requirements. In many cases, these older cables carry significant fuel load which can pose additional fire threats, and can release toxins such as halogens if ignited.

Being green takes more than a few power savings. To truly build a green data centre or green building many factors come into play, from length of use to power consumption

Carrie Higbie, Siemon Although removing and recycling abandoned cable will have a positive green impact, reducing the volume of potentially abandoned channels through proper management is an even better option. Intelligent infrastructure management systems (such as MapIT) can provide a lights-out advantage by allowing detailed monitoring of any MACs made. By providing a consistent and up-to-date diagram of the physical layer connections, channels can be managed and fully utilised before they become a management headache or a source of unchecked MAC work.

Intelligent infrastructure management can also reduce the power needs of active network equipment. When designed with a central patching field, an intelligent system can help ensure that all switch ports are utilised – decreasing the power needs for electronics by keeping unused ports to a minimum and providing energy savings which translate into further cooling savings.

CONSIDER THE LIFETIME
When installing data cabling, it is in the end-user’s best interest to install systems that will provide the maximum longevity. Currently, category 7/class F cabling is the highest performing cabling system on the market, with the ISO channel standard now published. The latter is characterised to 1,000MHz, or 1GHz per channel, which provides a significant amount of bandwidth above and beyond the latest 10Gb/s network speeds for copper. These higher bandwidth cabling systems are completely backwards compatible with older technology.

Siemon has explored the return on investment and total cost of ownership for cabling plants. Our conclusions are that lower-performing cabling will cost significantly more over the entire lifecycle of the cabling plant. When examining the green building initiatives, the reduction of materials that will need to be replaced over time is an even greater incentive to install higher-performing cabling.

Moving to higher performing class FA, fully-shielded cabling systems such as TERA will significantly reduce noise on the cabling channel, which can result in significant power savings in the active electronics by eliminating digital signal processing complexity used to suppress noise levels. A study presented jointly by Siemon and KeyEye Communications indicated that the use of fully-shielded cabling could offer a reduction of approximately 20 per cent in the overall power budget related to 10GBase-T chip architectures. The bulk of these savings would result from a reduction in the levels of DSP complexity associated with NEXT and FEXT cancellers.

TRULY GREEN
Being green takes more than a few power savings. To truly build a green data centre or green building many factors come into play, from length of use to power consumption. Disciplines that have historically been separate entities (namely facilities and networking) now have a reason to work towards a common goal. Infrastructure represents an area where significant energy and resource savings can be made and environmental impact carefully controlled. The expertise and technology is available – it’s now a matter of putting it into action.

This article first appeared in the 2008 edition of the Finance on Windows Partner Guide.

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