Data centers are “the locomotives of the Information Age,” driving commerce, delivering virtual products and enabling connectivity between communities, individuals and organizations. And these monsters consume a lot of energy via electrical power generating stations. Energy that in its production and transmission has varying environmental impacts: air, soil and water pollutants, open space and wildlife habitat consumption and destruction, and noise and visual pollution.

 

NetApp get the need to make data centers efficient. It had a justifiably grand opening Wednesday of its new energy-efficient dynamic data center located at the NetApp technology center in Research Triangle Park, or “RTP,” N.C. The celebration also marks the 10-year anniversary of NetApp in the RTP region.

 

The new 132,000-square-foot facility houses a 36,000-square-foot dynamic data center supporting 2,166 racks of data-processing equipment with a designed power load of nearly 25 megawatts. The new dynamic data center will enable NetApp to consolidate its engineering facilities into a global dynamic lab and provide a highly available and redundant infrastructure for NetApp's IT operations. It expands NetApp's engineering and development efforts, including furthering research initiatives to create and improve storage efficiency and cloud-enabling technologies.

 

NetApp's goals for sustainability and reducing data center power consumption are reflected in the center’s design and construction. NetApp estimates that the data center's power usage effectiveness, or “PUE,” (1) will be 1.2, or 80 percent more efficient than the average data center PUE of 2.0(2). This will result in NetApp saving $7.3 million a year. NetApp's energy efficiency improvements will also result in reducing carbon dioxide by 93,000 tons a year, which is equivalent to removing 15,400 cars from the road.

 

PUE is a metric, established by The Green Grid (News - Alert), used to determine the energy efficiency of a data center. PUE is obtained by dividing the amount of power entering a data center by the power used to run the computer infrastructure within it. PUE is therefore expressed as a ratio, with overall efficiency improving as the quotient decreases toward 1. A value of 1.00 would indicate 100 percent efficiency: all energy going into the data center is used to power the computer equipment and nothing else.

 

At the ceremony the Environmental Protection Agency presented NetApp with the prestigious ENERGY STAR (News - Alert) for the superior energy efficiency of its RTP office building 2; there are two buildings at the site. This signifies that the commercial building's energy performance rates in the top 25 percent of facilities nationwide, uses an average of 35 percent less energy than typical buildings, and releases 35 percent less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Building 2 has a rating of 95, which places it in the top 5 percent in terms of energy performance for facilities nationwide.

 

Here are the key features that will contribute to the RTP data center's energy efficiency:

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to its energy-efficient facility design, NetApp software the firm said will help dramatically improve data management and storage efficiency in the data center. The new dynamic data center will leverage the latest virtualization solutions to build a private cloud environment to provide virtual access for NetApp engineering labs around the world. The dynamic data center will also serve as a model for clients interested in building energy-efficient dynamic data centers and cloud environments for their enterprise users.