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The Greening of IT
166 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

These applications have led to an explosion of computing clusters being
deployed throughout Columbia, its peer research institutions, and organizations
in industries such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, and finance. Frequently
this has required construction of new server rooms or put pressure on space in
existing data centers. All this has led to increased demand for energy.
Columbia operates a 5,200 square-foot data center in support of the
University’s administrative and instructional computing needs. It is one of
several large and many small data centers at the University. The data center,
originally built in 1963, has been identified as having significant deficien-
cies, especially with respect to electrical distribution and air conditioning.
These deficiencies include the following:

■ Low voltage distribution over long cable distances with no Power
Distribution Units (PDUs) to reduce transmission losses.
■ Lack of a central Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) with instead
multiple individual inefficient (power factor of 70 percent) UPS units in
each server rack. (New centralized UPS units can be up to 95 percent effi-
cient.)
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■ Lack of hot and cold aisles, obstructed under-floor airflow, many unsealed
openings in floor tiles, and other methods of preventing mixing of hot
and cold air (multiple thermal inefficiencies).
■ Many old energy inefficient servers.

The computing resource required for research at Columbia will continue
to grow, especially as it is fueled by the explosive growth in HPC needs. In
spite of these growing needs for computing power, Columbia has committed
to reduce its greenhouse gas footprint by 30 percent by 2017 (relative to a
2007 baseline). As mentioned earlier, this planned reduction is part of
Columbia’s commitment to New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC
challenge. New York City has some of the highest energy costs and most
limited energy production and transmission capacity in the nation, so this
challenge is extremely important to the city’s environmental sustainability.
It also emphasizes the need for green data centers for all organizations in
the city.
During its analysis, the Columbia IT staff identified the following poten-
tial solutions to help reduce data center energy consumption:

■ Improve the efficiency and server density of the current data center to
make space for the new programs in as efficient a means as possible.