STEM

SU, IBM show how to decrease energy expended in data centers

Wednesday, July 27, 2011, By News Staff

Syracuse University and IBM on Tuesday, July 26, jointly hosted a strategic gathering of select chief information officers from industry, academe and government to learn how to reduce dramatically the energy consumed in the operation of their data centers. Data centers use enormous amounts of increasingly expensive energy to power and cool computers. In fact, it is typical for a data center to incur more energy costs per year than the combined value of the computers being powered. Reducing this critical input cost is at or near the top of every CIO’s priorities.

Working together over the past three years, SU and IBM have developed novel ways to reduce the energy used by a typical data center by as much as 60 percent and, with support from the State of New York, built a brand new, world-class data center on SU’s campus to demonstrate and showcase the innovations.

“Our partnership with SU gave us the opportunity to take a holistic view to design one of the most energy efficient data centers in production using leading-edge technologies and best practices in the industry,” says Greg Harwick, program director of IBM’s Data Center Services group. “The data center showcases state-of-the-art technologies such as liquid cooling, high-voltage DC power, thermodynamic modeling and on site co-generation power turbines.”

The result has been internationally hailed as possibly the “greenest” data center in the world, at the front edge of a global industry movement. The conference on July 26 allowed invited CIOs to see in great detail how to adopt the showcased technologies and reap associated economic and operational advantages.

“Syracuse University has been a model of what a progressive and intelligent technology user should be as we all look for ways to reduce carbon emissions, save energy and increase the resilience of critical operational facilities,” says Dave Blair, president of BHP Energy, a subsidiary of GEM Inc. BHP was the systems integrator for the energy and cooling technologies in the SU Green Data Center and a key presenter at Tuesday’s conference. BHP and IBM will be jointly pursuing advanced data center projects that build on the SU success, including a recently signed deal with the University of Toledo.