Macquarie Telecom Cuts Data Center Energy Consumption by 10%

Macquarie Hosting, today released preliminary data on the results of its Green IT Strategy designed to improve efficiency and reduce energy consumption in its data center.

(PRWEB) November 12, 2008 -- Macquarie Hosting, today released preliminary data on the results of its Green IT Strategy designed to improve efficiency and reduce energy consumption in its data center (http://www.macquarietelecom.com/hosting/data_centre/data_centre.htm).

Six months into the program the results showed that although the number of managed servers increased by 30 per cent on the previous six months, Macquarie Hosting had reduced energy consumption in its data center by more than 10 per cent.

This equates to more than 600 tonnes of CO2 emissions according to independent calculations by The Frame Group.

The Macquarie Hosting Green IT Strategy (http://www.macquarietelecom.com/hosting/data_centre/green_data_centre_initiatives.htm) focuses on achieving the ideal combination of energy efficiencies across multiple platforms, including dedicated hosting (http://www.macquarietelecom.com/hosting/dedicated_hosting.htm), used to support customers' mission critical applications.

In particular, it focuses on utilizing energy-efficient dedicated servers (http://www.macquarietelecom.com/hosting/dedicated_servers.htm) and networking equipment (e.g. switches, routers, firewalls), storage and solutions designed for managed virtualization (http://www.macquarietelecom.com/hosting/server_virtualisation/vmware_hosting_virtual_servers.htm) as well as implementation of redesigned best practice data center infrastructure (e.g. air-flow efficient racks and cooling).

"Macquarie Telecom's data center accounted for around 90 per cent of our company power bill," said Aidan Tudehope, Managing Director, Hosting, Macquarie Telecom.

"Our analysis showed that a large corporate data center can consume as much as forty times the energy of a typical Australian office housing 100 staff.

"Medium to large businesses looking to reduce their carbon footprint can make a significant impact by starting in the data center, rather than just switching off lights at the end of each day," he said.

Macquarie Telecom achieved the energy and associated cost reductions through a structured approach to monitoring, measuring and subsequently standardising the appropriate technologies to maximise power and cooling efficiency within the data center.

This approach has seen the data center cooling power load reduced by 26 per cent from this time six months ago.

It also identified that in some areas, 80 per cent of power consumption in the data center came from 20 per cent of users while storage accounted for as much as 30-40 per cent of power consumption.

After six months of measurement and planning, Macquarie Telecom commenced its full implementation program in January 2008 with a strong focus on designing for virtualization and utilising a mix of energy efficient dual core and quad core servers, for customer managed environments.

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