Saving energy in data centres

RenewIT, a European Commission research project, has launched the final version of its free online tool for the design and placement of energy-efficient and renewable-powered data centres. While it is currently only applicable for Europe, future development of the tool may extend to North America and Asia.

The tool is designed to help data centre operators, designers and other stakeholders select the optimum combination of efficiency measures and renewables for energy and carbon sustainable facilities. It also makes it easy to compare more than 60 locations across Europe in terms of electricity costs, access to renewables and other factors that influence decisions when planning the site of a new facility.

Financial services company ING was involved with the project from the outset amd RenewIT was able to demonstrate how the company could improve the efficiency of one of its carbon-neutral facilities through use of a biogas fuel cell and by raising the operating temperature in its data centre.

“After three years of research and development, it’s great to be able to launch the finalised RenewIT Tool and more importantly that we can make it available for free,” said Andrew Donoghue, RenewIT project spokesperson, and data centre analyst at 451 Research.

“The tool is truly unique. It not only allows data centre operators to model the benefits and costs of on-site and grid renewables but also the efficiency gains from technologies such as free cooling, and even workload management, can also be assessed in detail,” he said.

The project, which is due to end in September 2016, has also released a number of other software tools and research reports on its main web site including:

• Renewable energy optimised data centre monitoring tool: an online monitoring tool for data centre operators to manage facilities that generate energy on-site using renewables sources such as solar and wind. (The final tool is not available for free but a demo version can be accessed on the main project website).
• A free catalogue of advanced renewable and energy efficiency technologies: these data centre design documents help data centre operators integrate renewable and energy-efficiency technologies. Examples include combining district heating and cooling networks, re-use of heat, free cooling, and electrical storage. 
• Renewable energy optimised data centre workload management. The project has also developed a Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), as well as associated research, which can be used to optimise data centre IT workloads to maximise use of renewable energy. 
• Green data centre library: this features a collection of TRNSYS-based energy components to model both energy-efficiency and renewable energy technologies. 

RenewIT has worked closely with the data centre industry through its advisory board and its team of data centre operators who provided on-going data and feedback on tools and research. The project also cooperated with other research projects to develop new renewable energy and energy efficiency metrics through the European Commission Smart City Cluster.

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