Efficient Air has delivered energy
savings for Colt Technology Services’
at two of its London data centres. It
was able to carry out this work
within its SPHERE programme, a
service designed for the optimisation
of legacy datacentres.

Air was bypassing servers, in some
cases entirely, with insufficient
pressure and velocity being available
thus starving servers of cooling
leading to hot spots and excessive
cold spots. In contrast, other areas
were over pressurised, leading to
wasted energy. Grille location and
modulation is critical, so Balometers
were employed to monitor velocities
and subsequent air flow with a
further replacement schedule
implemented.

Along with a floor void pressure
improvement regime, installation of
high efficiency fans with backward
curved blades suitable for speed
regulation on a 0-10volt pressure
signal took place. Cooling units were
commissioned with optimised control
using cooling unit redundancy.

The project resulted in a 44%
contribution to Colt’s 10% corporate
PUE objective for 2010. It achieved
9% average savings on the total
datacentre cooling load, 9% savings
on non-IT overall site loads, 64%
saving on air delivery plant load, fan
savings ranging from 56 to 86%, a
36% increase in redundancy (n+1 to
n+3) and payback of 14months.