Green Data Centers: Crazy… Like a Fox

A St. Louis architectural firm is moving into the vanguard of efforts to solve some of the nation’s knottiest business and environmental problems. The firm is Fox Architects and the problems they are solving involve data centers.

Fox Architects has  developed an approach to corporate data center design that combines energy conservation with human resource considerations. George Osman, Monsanto's director of operations and engineering  and Bob Dunn, principal, Fox Architects, in front of the Monsanto data center's hurricane-proof sunlight screen.

Data centers?

“Data centers are infrastructure that no one really thinks about, but are a big part of what makes the world go round,” said John
Berendzen, Principal, Fox Architects. “Just as coal and steam technology were engines for the Industrial Revolution, data centers are the engines for today’s technology dependent businesses, considering that just aboutevery transaction today ends up as bits and bytes passing through computer systems linked throughout the world,” he added. Fox Architects has designed innovative data centers for Monsanto and Emerson, two
international companies based in St. Louis.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines a data center as any facility that primarily contains electronic equipment used
for data processing (servers), data storage and communications (network equipment). That includes everything from a closet with a server
in it to a dedicated building with racks of tens of thousands of blade servers. Data centers are supposed to run all the time,

24 hours a day, seven days a week. According to the 7x24 Exchange, when data centers don’t run, “businesses don’t bring in revenue,” and any unplanned “downtime,” or interruption in operations, “can be disastrous.” The 7x24 Exchange is a business association dedicated to spreading information that can help businesses keep their data centers and servers operating all the time. Another organization, the Uptime Institute, is devoted to the same goal. Joe Loper, Vice President of research and
analysis for the Alliance to Save Energy, said that in 2006 there were thousands of data centers across the country housing some 10 million servers. That is twice the number of
servers there were in 2000 and growth is accelerating, with the number of servers installed in the U.S. expected to hit 15.8 million in 2010. As
companies and institutions which use servers accumulate more and more of them, there is a growing tendency to concentrate them in large numbers in “enterprise” data centers
instead of scattering them around in data rooms and closets.

Let the Light In

A major cause of “downtime” in data centers is human error, so Fox Architects has a simplesounding response: Design data centers for
people. Data centers typically are windowless bunkers. The thinking is that they are for computers, not people, and computers are
better protected by solid walls without windows.

“The mentality for building Tier 3 and Tier 4 data centers (data centers designed to withstand natural or human-made disasters
and keep operating) had been that windows are a hazard so no natural light should be allowed,” said Steven Black, who has helped
build several enterprise data centers and high-tech buildings for McCarthy.

Fox Architects took the view that eventhough data centers typically have small staffs, people still fi ll a vital role in keeping
data centers running. “The U.S. Green Building Council has multiple studies linking access to daylight to better human productivity,”
said Fox Architects’ Bob Dunn, so the design firm worked to let daylight into data centers without compromising their tier ratings.

Two years ago, Fox Architects designed a bank of windows on the eastern elevation of the new data center they were designing for
Monsanto. They specifi ed a glazing system that had been certified to withstand hurricane force winds. It still took some convincing, but ultimately Monsanto opted for daylight. To add security, the windows are on a corridor, not a server floor wall. The partition wall between the corridor and the server floor is another
glass wall, and even glass doors, so that natural light from the corridor can fl ood into the server room. An architectural sunscreen on the
front of the building mitigates solar heat gain while letting light into the building.

Incorporating the windows did not sacrifice security. “The Monsanto Data Center’s efficient design can withstand a tornado producing
winds in excess of 200 mph and an earthquake measuring up to 5 on the Richter scale”, said Dipak Kapadia, Vice President of construction
and senior project manager for Guarantee Electrical Co., the project’s electrical contractor.

Fox Architects also included high performance windows in their design for Emerson’s new data center, scheduled for completion in July 2009. “You can’t ignore the advances in glazing technology,” Black said. “This glazing is certified by the code officials in Miami-Dade County, Florida to withstand 150 mile per hour projectiles. That is great.” Black was the project manager on the Monsanto data center project for McCarthy.

The windows “are a big improvement for people in the data center,” said John Buescher, project director for McCarthy. How much so? Lee Quarles, a Monsanto spokesman, said the company’s experience with its old data center was that an average of two IT people in the data center would leave in every eight-month period. Since the Fox-designed data center opened nine months ago, no one has left. “The amount of daylight in the new data center is one of the chief things that employees like about the new building, and it is a big
selling point to potential IT recruits,” he said.

Grappling with Energy Use and Greenhouse Gases

In addition to tackling human error, Fox Architects also set its sights on energy use. Keeping data centers operating takes a lot of energy.
The EPA estimates that in 2006, data centers used 61 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, or about 1.5 percent of the electricity generated
in the nation’s power plants. The EPA estimates that all that electricity cost the industry about $4.5 billion and is equivalent to all the energy
used by all the companies in the U.S. that are involved in making cars, trucks, buses, trains,
aircraft, boats, barges and ships.

That energy use is growing rapidly. The EPA estimates that without major gains in efficiency, data centers will consume 100 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2011 at a cost of more than $7.4 billion. Depending on the source, estimates of the amount of generating capacity needed to supply to supply that energy ranges
from 30 baseline, coal-fi red power plants to 120 merchant power plants. Any cap or fee on carbon emissions could raise the cost of that
energy even more.

William Tschudi, program manager for energy efficiency in high-tech buildings at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence
Berkeley Labs, worked on the EPA estimates, which are in a report the agency presented to Congress in August 2007. He put the energy
use into an enterprise reference frame. “The typical rack of state-of-the-art servers draws 20 kilowatts of power. If you are paying 10
cents per kilowatt-hour, that one rack will use $17,000 worth of electricity in one year. Since a data center can have hundreds of such racks, any improvement in energy effi ciency can pay big dividends,” he said.

That energy use is the reason data centers are getting so much attention not just from businesses, which have formed such groups as the Green Grid and the Alliance to Save Energy to research and promote energy saving practices, but also from politicians in Congress, who mandated the EPA study.Tschudi and the EPA estimate that only one-half of the power consumed by data centers is used by IT equipment. The rest is consumed in power conversions, maintaining the availability of backup power and cooling. They estimated that the power and cooling infrastructure needed to support a server now costs more than the server itself. McKinsey and Co., in a report for the
Uptime Institute, said the costs of power and cooling are escalating so much that they are crowding IT improvements out of budgets.

Why are power and cooling costs so high at data centers? Because data center facilities “are essentially refrigerators for space heaters,” Dunn said. That, said Tschudi, is because
“all the electric power used by servers is converted to heat.” The typical data center includes not just racks of IT equipment, but also uninterruptible power supply (UPS) units, which act as battery backups to keep IT equipment running when there is a temporary loss of power; power distribution units (PDUs) and computer room
air conditioning units (often called CRAC units).

Separate and Recycle

One of the first things Fox Architects did in their designs for Monsanto and Emerson was to take electrical equipment, such as UPS units, PDUs and air conditioning equipment off the data floor. For Monsanto, they designed a two story building, assigning the electrical and mechanical equipment to the fi rst fl oor and the IT equipment to the second. That did two things: It keeps electricalequipment from adding to the server floor heat load and keeps maintenance workers out of the IT room, which means “they don’t have to worry about dropping something or accidentally hitting something when they turn around,” said Dunn. The electrical equipment at Monsanto includes “a breaker monitoring
system capable of remotely measuring power consumption on every circuit in the data center and backup UPS and emergency generator systems so it can continue to operate
throughout a power outage,” Kapadia said.

Moving electrical and cooling equipment off the server floor also freed fl oor space for servers. “CRAC units are not small. They take up a lot of space on the fl oor and a data center floor is expensive real estate,” Black said. “What the Fox team did in taking the cooling off the floor is pretty innovative. It is great stuff ,” said Black. How innovative was it? As Monsanto prepared to open its new data center, industry publications were still touting software for planning the best configuration of CRAC units as the cutting edge in cooling efficiency.

Richard Janis, president of the St. Loui based mechanical and electrical engineering company William Tao Associates, has long advocated separating mechanical andelectrical equipment from server rooms. The role of the architect, however, is to provide a building design that will do that efficiently without hampering the operations of theserver room. By all accounts, Fox succeeded. The next thing Fox Architects did was design the air handling system to use recycled air to cool electrical equipment on the fi rst fl oor. In cooperation with William Tao Associates, they designed a system that supplies cold air at the fl oor of the server room, at whatevertemperature Monsanto desires. It exhaust the air at the ceiling after it has been warmed by the servers, but then pulls the warmer air through a plenum in the ceiling and down the perimeterwalls to condition the fi rst fl oor equipment rooms.

“Transformers and UPS units don’t have to be cooled as much as servers,” Dunn said. “The big diff erence between Monsanto and the other data centers I’ve seen is how they handle the air. At Monsanto they recycle it,” said Black. That puts a premium on contractors constructing a tight building envelope, but it pays off . Quarles said that
Monsanto has found that the new data center uses 30 percent less energy than its old one.

Although not common, and not included in the EPA’s list of best practices, separating mechanical and electrical equipment from the computer fl oor and then cooling them with recycled air “is certainly a good practice,” Loper said. A representative of the Uptime Institute called it “innovative…neat stuff .” Fox’s design also saved money on construction.
Buescher said the main cause of the savings was that the layout of the building kept down the cost of handling air. “There was a lot less piping and fewer controls than is typical,” he said.

Moving beyond energy savings to energy production, Fox Architects designed Emerson’s newmdata center with a photovoltaic (PV) array on the roof
to generate electricity from sunlight. “Emerson will gain 13.6 percent of one day’s electrical needs from the solar array, which will feed computer loads directly
through the main switchboard,” Berendzen said.

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