Hitachi claims greenest-ever data centre

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Data storage company Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has opened a new data centre in Yokohama, Japan, that the company said is the greenest ever.

The new data centre has been designed from the ground up to be green, and achieves The Green Grid's PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) rating of 1.6. This, HDS said, makes it the most efficient data centre in its class.

The company has installed the latest, low-energy storage, networking and server equipment. The IT equipment alone should allow the Yokohama facility to use 20 per cent less power than comparable data centres, as well as making it easier and cheaper to manage.

But Hitachi has also built in other energy-saving measures, such as thermal hydraulic cooling devices, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems and highly advanced power supply converters. The new data centre forms part of a plan for HDS and its parent company to cut power consumption by 50 per cent by 2012 and to reduce carbon emissions by 330,000 tons (302 million kg) in the same timeframe. Hitachi hopes that the move will set a new standard for next-generation data centres.

According to Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer at HDS, the targets being set for Yokohama are "very aggressive" for a data centre of its type, with full redundancy and business continuity features. "Most data centres run at three watts of electricity for every watt of computing power," he told IT PRO. "We are looking at a ratio of 1.6."

But although Hitachi has access to the latest low-energy storage networking hardware from HDS, Yoshida maintains that companies should be able to achieve significant power savings in their data centres, even without investing in new IT hardware.

"The first thing that you have to do in data centres is to measure," said Yoshida. "Often when companies measure, they find a lot of waste that they can recover, often just by turning things off. A lot of systems might not be being used, it is just a question of controlling them. The next step is to move the configurations around: you can make further savings by ensuring that you are not mixing hot and cold air." Such measures can save at least 10 per cent in data centre operational costs, without the need to buy new hardware, he said.

The announcement comes as industry analysts have found that green issues are becoming a critical factor in data centre purchasing decisions.

The Yokohama data centre will be used to support computing requirements across the Hitachi group.

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