He’s also working on being as efficient as possible in the data centre: “Data centres are huge power users, so it’s crucial to operate as responsibly as possible. We don’t have any gas boilers to heat our offices – that’s all done with the waste heat from the servers”. There is a limit to how much you can do with that waste heat, which tends to emerge in the form of water at 35C to 40C. He uses free air cooling, but doesn’t use water cooling as proposed by IBM, since “we don’t find it a benefit compared to the risks”.
More advanced options, such as liquid cooling on the blades themselves (as proposed by Iceotope), are simply not feasible for UKSolutions, he says. Blades immersed in coolant would represent an increased risk, and he is a host to equipment owned by third parties who might not trust the new blades required, or want to invest in them. “The reliability of new systems such as Iceotope’s is still unproven,” he said.
Despite an occasional trade-off between efficiency and reliability, UKSolutions is also aiming to be reliable. One of its data centres is ranked as Tier III by the Uptime Institute’s reliability measure, while the other is “aligned to a Tier-IV design”. Lowe claims that it is impossible for a data centre to get Uptime Tier IV ranking in this country: “We looked it up and you have to to go into bargaining and negotiation, but from the published documents it is impossible to get Tier-IV in this country because you need armed guards and Federal building certificates.”
The Uptime Institute denied this claim that Tier-IV was impossible in the UK, pointing to the Compuatacenter facility in Romford built by Infinity, which has a Tier-IV rating, but is working on new versions of its ratings, and suggesting that Lowe may be confusing their scheme with the US-only TIA-942 scheme. Lowe says he and others are working to create a European equivalent or extension of the Uptime rankings: “It doesn’t fit and they know it doesn’t fit,” he said.
Uptime Tiers, the Green Grid’s efforts, and the European Code of Conduct for data centres form three prongs of a move to better data centres, he says – but even the home-grown part of that faces an uphill struggle, as users have not picked it up in great numbers. Part of the problem is it is not a good fit with shared-use space, says Lowe.
“There has been an initial uptake of the European Code, but there are some parts that don’t make total sense,” says Lowe. Some parts even reduce efficiency, he says. “An iteration is probably a good move, and there is talk of it being mandated, I don’t see that as being a bad position to be in – I’m not a proponent of over-legislation, but there are data centre operations that need some incentive to improve. I’m not saying it should be law, but it could be best practice, so some vertical markets might make it mandatory”.
“The EU Code of Conduct is on our roadmap of things we are trying to achieve,” he says, but as with CRC, applying the requirements of the EU Code would be complex in a multi-tenant data centre. Not every customer would want to move to the Code, pay for the upgrade to the whole building do that, but the Code can only be applied to a whole building. “Unless there is an incentive, multi-tenant data centres won’t comply with the EU Code.”
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I tend to agree with the piece above. If heavy industry was not already decimated (no steel industry to speak of now), this would be the death knell for it. In IT, this will just drive web-hosting and data-centres to other countries with less tax liabilities or no restrictions. The EEC carbon trading credit scheme has already been brought into disrepute by companies working the system to their advantage by selling off surplus credits. Things may get even worse in the USA (Googe for "eec carbon credit abuse" to see that I mean - also check the FAUSTIES BLOG page about Goldman etc - a bit worrying).