By Jamie Beckett, May 2008
HP is one of 15 winners of an annual InfoWorld Green 15 award for an experimental data center it established in Bangalore, India. The award goes to
organizations that have embraced sustainable technologies to reap environmental benefits.
HP Labs consolidated 14 data centers in Bangalore into a high-density, 70,000-square-foot data center, one of the largest in India. Besides the challenges of pulling 14 inefficiently designed data centers into a single, efficient one, researchers had to contend with the region's unreliable primary energy supply.
To fix the problem and conduct research, members of HP's Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab set up the largest-ever deployment to date of HP's Dynamic Smart Cooling technology.
Energy savings
The result is one of the most sensor-rich data centers in the world, yielding a 20 percent reduction in cooling power consumption upon startup.
Once fully optimized, the Dynamic Smart Cooling-based data center is expected to save 7,500 megawatt-hours (MWh) annually – equal to the power consumption of more than 750 U.S. homes – and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 7,500 tons annually. In addition to those benefits, the data center's sensor-based system – provided in real time – lets researchers manage the Bangalore cooling system from HP Labs headquarters in Palo Alto, CA.
That results in less air travel, which has an added "green" benefit.
InfoWorld award criteria
InfoWorld said its goal with the awards isn't simply to honor initiatives based on what inspired them.
Instead, the magazine said, it considered "the net effects of the projects, taking into account what technologies and best practices were applied to a business goal and what the ultimate result was in terms of environmental benefits, the business implications, and the lessons learned to be applied to future initiatives."
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