Data centre cuts energy use by 40 per cent

A data centre in London's East End claimed to have cut the power consumption of its servers by 40 per cent, largely by switching to DC-based power.

Shoreditch-based Ultraspeed said it managed to achieve the decrease in energy use by switching away from AC power to DC, using "diskless" servers and deploying low-power processors.

The hosting company had already moved to separate disks from servers by deploying a Storage Area Network (SAN) in May. Servers now boot up from images held within the SAN over a gigabit Ethernet connection. This, the company found, prevented one of major causes of individual server failure - a defective hard disk - and reduced power consumption by 10 per cent.

The shift to DC power provided the company with the most cost savings. AC power operates at 75 per cent efficiency with the rest converting straight to heat. DC power works at 93 per cent efficiency and much of the excess thermal load is away from the server which means that less cooling is needed. This has led to a saving of around 30 per cent of the data centre's entire energy consumption.

The company has also started to use low-voltage processors from Intel. It said that the Xeon 5300 chip's quad core architecture produced more computing power per watt and meant separate processors with extra power requirements weren't needed.

Jordan Gross, commercial director said that data centres could offer extra facilities and functionalities without adding to the problem of climate change.

"Switching to lower energy technology is therefore an imperative not just for the environment but is also needed for UK businesses to remain competitive," said Gross.

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