NTT America, in collaboration with NTT Worldwide Telecommunications and NTT Facilities USA, has announced that it has significantly reduced the energy required to cool its two largest North American data centers: the Sterling Data Center in Sterling, VA and the San Jose Data Center in San Jose, CA.

At these data centers, NTT America will collectively reduce electricity consumption by over 7.6 million kWh and carbon emissions by over 10 million lbs. a year, saving the company a projected $630,000 annually in energy costs. This week, NTT America’s vice president of data center infrastructure, Tarif Abboushi, will speak on these and other advancements in data center cooling at the 2nd Annual Fall Forum on Financing, Investing & Real Estate Development for Data Centers, in Los Angeles.

As part of several broad energy efficiency initiatives undertaken company-wide, NTT America continually monitors advancements in energy conservation technologies. NTT America, NTT Worldwide Telecommunications, a firm that performs global data center operations for the NTT Communications Group, and NTT Facilities USA, selected Vigilent, a leader in intelligent energy management systems, as NTT America’s energy management partner after substantial due diligence and a highly successful pilot project at the NTT America San Jose Data Center.

Following on proven performance of the Vigilent system during the pilot project, NTT America extended deployments at both the San Jose and Sterling data centers. The deployments at the two data centers encompassed 178 DX and chilled-water computer room air conditioners (CRACs), and in total more than 3,000 racks of servers, within 135,000 sq ft of floor space.

“We are delighted to partner with NTT Facilities USA to support NTT Worldwide Telecommunications’ and NTT America’s pioneering and innovative green data center initiatives,” said Mark Housley, CEO of Vigilent. “Our joint efforts at NTT America’s Sterling and San Jose facilities have provided a solid foundation upon which we plan to expand our partnership efforts on a worldwide basis, including an immediate push into the rapidly-growing data center markets throughout Asia.”

The Vigilent system was chosen based on delivery of significant energy savings and operational benefits, which include uptime protection through load balancing of cooling resources, improved thermal stability and a reduction in the number of hot and cold spots throughout the data center. Equally important decision factors were ease of Vigilent system implementation and uninterrupted service at both data centers. Real-time and continuous cooling optimization, combined with powerful “what-if” planning tools, also supported NTT America’s decision to integrate Vigilent technology as a core part of its operational infrastructure.

The Vigilent system is uniquely able to deliver cost saving benefits through dynamic, automated control of extremely complex cooling environments utilizing advanced, artificial intelligence technology. The system employs a wireless mesh network of sensors which provide real-time feedback from tens to thousands of data points throughout the data center to an artificial intelligence engine. The engine incorporates this data, along with thousands of other variables, to dynamically and continually adjust air cooling and flow equipment for maximum efficiency in alignment with changing IT loads, within pre-specified environmental parameters.

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