CASE STUDY
other energy inefficiencies. The firm also uses perforated tiles
and blanking panels to prevent hot air from creeping into
cabinets or flowing into cold aisles.
With business growing – and the completion recently of
several company acquisitions – the firm made the decision
to expand its data centre operations to a Tier III colocation
facility. The data centre team took the opportunity to exam
its cabinet configurations and power distribution strategy,
and to introduce new efficiency tools to both data centres.
Project challenges
The accounting firm’s new colocation site will serve dual roles
– both production and disaster recovery. Critical applications
from the legacy data centre will be replicated in the
colocation site. The goal over time is to have equal production
in both data centres.
In the same time frame as the move to the colocation data
centre, the firm had been migrating towards blade servers
and virtualisation – reducing the compute per square footage
of its physical real estate while increasing the power density
of its data centres. Higher voltage power would be required in
the denser-configured cabinets filled with blade computers.
Older low-density 2 to 4 kW cabinets were being replaced with
6 to 8 kW cabinets filled with blade servers tightly packed in
each cabinet. The move to virtualisation freed up substantial
cabinet space in the data centre at headquarters, but power
capacity constraints were a concern.
Whereas in the new colocation there was plenty of floor
space and power capacity for future expansions – almost a
megawatt of power for the 5,000 square foot space. However,
managing power consumption and cooling was a concern
in the new site. Another challenge was determining power
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