InfoWorld recently recognized Syracuse University as one of the winners of its 2010 Green 15 awards for the school’s recently finished Green Data Center.

InfoWorld, an information technology online publication, honors 15 green technology initiatives with the Green 15 awards every year. This year’s awards were announced Thursday, on Earth Day. The awards’ purpose is to recognize organizations that use green technology to encourage trimming waste, saving energy and reducing the production of harmful chemicals.

The data center is the university’s main computing facility that stores student records and faculty information, among other items. The university teamed up with IBM and received funding from the state to create a data center that is designed to produce 50 percent less energy than a typical data center.

The Green 15 award looks at what initiative saves the most money, as well as how innovative a project really is.

“In the case of Syracuse, the data center brings together some technologies and techniques that aren’t at all common in other data centers,” said Ted Samson, information technology expert at InfoWorld.

Syracuse was the only American university to be selected on the list. Other winners from this year’s Green 15 awards include the insurance company Aflac, for its plan of paperless practices. Dell, Intel and Standard Bank also made the list.

“We want to demonstrate that there are some creative things that can be done to improve energy efficiency,” said Chris Sedore, information technology vice president and chief information officer.

One of the major innovative ideas behind the data center is that it uses direct current power to generate all its energy, Sedore said. The traditional source of power is alternating current, but that is known to waste much more energy.

Some companies steer away from direct current power because they are under the misconception that its high voltage is dangerous, Samson said.

The Green Data Center will hopefully show people this idea about direct current is wrong, Sedore said. He said some telecommunications carriers have been using direct current power for quite some time.

“Percentage-wise, the thing about data centers is that they’re on all the time and they draw significant qualities of electricity,” Sedore said. “So if there’s an opportunity that allows us to reduce electricity usage, that energy is something you get back 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 52 weeks a year. So I think making data centers more efficient is pretty critical.”

Data centers were consuming 2 percent of the total power in the United States in 2007, and that number was doubling every five years, according to a report by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2007. One reason SU’s Green Data Center came about was because IBM and its Smarter Planet initiative wanted to reduce this fast-growing number, said Bob Hanson, innovative leader at IBM.

Hanson hopes other universities and organizations will mirror what SU has already accomplished with its new data center, he said.

“The (Green Data Center) will continue to be a role model of advanced energy-efficient technology for data centers,” Hanson said.

The Green Data Center was originally completed in December 2009 but became fully functional this month. The project cost about $12.4 million and uses 12,000 square feet of space. It is located on SU’s South Campus and replaces SU’s old data center.

The Green Data Center also uses natural gas-fueled microturbines to generate electricity.

Another main component of the center is a sensor system that monitors server temperatures and adjusts the amount of cooling depending on the heat. This temperature-regulation method is an initiative that is quickly becoming popular, Samson said.

“More companies will embrace tools for real time monitoring of efficiency of their servers, as well as conditions such as temperature and humidity, so they see where there’s room for a server to have a bigger load of work or an opportunity to turn down the air-conditioning,” Samson said.

Samson said cooling is a huge source of waste in data centers because many companies do not monitor the need for cooling, so “their projects are flying blind.”

For SU to continue its green initiatives, Samson recommends the university should evaluate how wasteful it is acting because “it depends on what measures the school has in place today.” The school has to set a goal and measure and report progress, he said.

“I’ve also found that organizations that are most successful at embracing green practices are ones where the directive to be green comes from the top,” Samson said. “That is, company or school leaders need to support and promote greener practices from the top down.”

 

Published on April 28, 2010 at 12:00 pm