Cisco Systems achieved an estimated savings of $120,000 per year in energy costs by simulating a data center using Future Facilities’ Virtual Facility (VF) simulation methodology. The simulation results were used to guide the placement of floor grilles, blanking panels, and hot exhaust isolation that lowered information technology (IT) equipment inlet temperatures, making it possible to raise the chilled water setpoint by 8ºF.
Cisco has several teams focusing on external energy-efficient solutions development, including engineering, professional services, technical solutions marketing, and customer advocacy teams. Cisco is also taking steps to aggressively reduce its impact as a user of resources. Cisco announced in June 2008 that it would seek to reduce its carbon footprint by 25 percent from 2007 levels by 2012. This percentage is an absolute reduction across employee travel and owned and leased real estate. Cisco's strategy for reduction involves using its own technology to meet this public commitment. Given that Cisco's footprint is almost 80 percent lab and data center, the solutions developed to support an in-house reduction will have relevance to the company’s customer's IT management in support of a green agenda.
Cisco’s Data Center Advanced Services group is responsible for helping enterprise data center managers across both facilities and IT take control of their power growth and costs and the related green implications. This group utilizes a standard methodology focused on:
Cisco helps users achieve higher levels of operating efficiency, not just in the original data center design but also throughout the entire life cycle.
Cisco used its Efficiency Assurance Program (EAP) to develop a standardized process. The new process provides prescriptive guidance as opposed to professorial theory. Cisco used one of its own data centers in San Jose for a demonstration. The plan for this data center was to replace volume servers with blade servers. A single rack full of blade servers provides roughly 23 times the computing capacity of a rack filled with volume servers. But blade servers require much more power-typically 20 kilowatts per rack compared to 5 kilowatts per rack for volume servers. This substantial increase in density as volume servers are converted to blade servers represents one of the industry’s greatest challenges today.
The data center occupies approximately 7,000 square feet and is filled with 3,202 units of IT equipment, drawing 770 kW. There is 1 MW of total power available and 820 kW of cooling capacity. The facility has been in operation since 1999 with limited considerations for efficient operations. The total energy bill for the facility was originally $1.4 million per year, including $660,000 per year in cooling energy costs and $707,000 per year in IT equipment energy costs.
A team led by Chris Noland, DCSTG engineering manager for Cisco, employed two techniques in parallel to improve energy efficiency. The first included a familiar set of best practices that included blanking panels and plastic curtains to prevent mixing of supply and return air. Noland’s team saw the best practices approach had two major limitations. First, best practices offer no prediction of outcome, and Noland wanted a return on investment estimate in advance to justify the required expenditure. Second, best practices address room-level efficiency issues. In most data centers, efficiency problems are as likely to be caused by thermal incompatibilities between IT equipment and cabinets as they are by flawed room designs.
The second technique is VF simulation. The VF is a detailed, 3D model that can simulate the space, power, and cooling behavior of an actual facility, including thermal interactions between the room infrastructure, cooling system, cabinets, and individual units of IT equipment. Throughout the life cycle, from initial design, construction, commissioning to day-to-day operations, VF can replace inadequate rules-of-thumb with scientific precision to manage the resiliency and efficiency of a mission-critical facility.