Environmental solutions
Given the global environmental challenges facing the world now and into the future, having a ‘green’ data centre can provide significant cost and sustainability rewards for both your organisation and our environment.
Energy efficiency and corporate responsibility go hand in hand. With consolidation and optimisation alone you can mitigate risk and make significant savings for your organisation. OPC is committed to reducing our carbon footprint and is embracing technologies that assist in achieving this for ourselves and for our clients.
- Green data centre
- System consolidation and optimisation
- Virtualisation and rationalisation
- Power optimisation, monitoring and assessment
- Systems network and energy management
- Green inspiration
OPC can undertake an assessment of your current infrastructure and provide you with the expertise to develop a strategic plan of sustainability for your organisation
Click here to calculate your organisation’s carbon footprint or to find out things you can do to help slow climate change
Green data centre
According to ComputerWeekly.com (21 April 2008), “roughly 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions are generated by the IT industry, according to Gartner research in September 2007. Worse still, 23% of that share could be blamed on the power needed to run and cool servers in datacentres...
Although it started life as a back-office support function, the datacentre has transformed from a "glorified computerised filing cabinet" (in many people's eyes) to a major consumer of resources.”
Considerations and key benefits of having a green data centre:
- Space Saving - Ensure more efficient use of your data centre floor space with server and storage consolidation
- Power Saving – Many data centres are running out of power. New equipment, server, storage and networking products provide greater performance and use far less power than old, outdated equipment.
- Cooling Capacity – Data centres in years gone by allowed for 2-3kW cooling capacity. The heat density of today’s data centre has increased 10 fold and is way past what was ever envisaged with power and cooling representing more than 50% of the energy used.
Click here to contact OPC for expert advice.
System consolidation and optimisation
SQL Server consolidation has been a widely used strategy for many years. As servers have become more powerful, their ability to handle more services on a single piece of hardware has increased. This has been further enhanced by the introduction of multi-core processors a few years ago as servers with the same number of physical CPUs can handle even more work without increasing the licensing requirements.
Considerations and key benefits of consolidation and optimisation include:
- Reduced licensing costs
- Clustered databases that reduce downtime
- Ability to reassign redundant hardware to other tasks
Virtualisation and rationalisation
"Virtualisation will have the biggest impact of any technology on datacentre computing over the next few years, as there are so many good things that result. From consolidation, to automation, to green computing - virtualisation has its finger in all these pies." (Dennis Szubert, ComputerWeekly.com, Aug 08)
Considerations and key benefits of virtualisation and rationalisation include:
- Identification of redundant hardware
- Reduced power and associated costs
- Increased efficiency
- Greater flexibility
- Less office space required
Power optimisation, monitoring and assessment
Data centre monitoring and control is a critical element of maintaining maximum availability for your critical operations. Assessment of the infrastructure of your data centre, its critical load cooling requirements and identification of single points of failure are all required in order to determine the best power solutions. Once this is established, a range of monitoring options can be implemented from spot checking to continual activity logging, depending on your requirements.
Monitoring and control systems must be:
- Cost effective
- Quickly deployed and implemented
- Easy to use
- Proactive
- Utilise intuitive alarming and escalation methodologies and
- Provide robust reporting all from a central, secure, location.
Systems network and energy management
Consideration needs to be given to heavy communication network loads and transit time constraints when designing Wide Area Network (WAN) systems in order to prevent communication issues. In addition, power outage contingencies must be incorporated early in the design.
Green inspiration
OPC advocates the benefits of plants in the workplace and provides these for selected clients as well as for our own team
Benefits include:
- Reduced levels of harmful toxins
- Reduced CO2
- Increased O2
- Improved humidity levels
- Mediated temperature levels
- Reduced noise and echo
- Improved well being and morale
- Improved stress levels and behaviour
- Reduced sick leave
- Improved productivity
- Improved perceptions of our work place
