GE's strategy of combining its latest technology developments with building management systems is driving down data center costs.

This week the company revealed a major cost cutting project at its own Ohio data center as part of the company's ecomagination business strategy.

The company says it has used the technologies (see below) to save 11 per cent of the annual energy used for cooling at its data center. The facility has 29,000 square feet of raised floor – equivalent to six professional basketball courts – and includes more than 3,800 IT systems. It consumes 24 million kWh of power each year.

To help with the reduction of water and energy, GE is updating the data center with nearly 30 products from nine different GE businesses, including power quality, chilled water, electrical, security and IT services equipment.

Among the products deployed at the Ohio data center are the Simple, Holistic View of the Data Center:
The automation solution installed at the data center will provide a simple view of all operations with drill-down capabilities into specific functional elements and equipment.

Through a dashboard application, the data center is provided with summary, comparative, and location operational performance data so that challenges and improvement opportunities can be quickly identified, quantified and acted upon.

The dashboard will have two main running views that can then be drilled down to the sensor level:
1) A simple visualization of all data centers that indicates both alarm condition by function, and various key performance indicators including KW usage versus capacity.

2) A more detailed look at an individual site, with deeper information by operational function - including a 13-month running trend of key operating metrics.

“Our immediate goal was to reduce cost,” said Greg Simpson, chief technology officer, GE. “We needed to reduce water and electrical consumption and leverage ambient air for cooling during the winter months, reduce waste water and improve survivability to insure the data center doesn’t go down.”

Other goals were to increase cooling capacity to keep pace with the growth of the number of servers, improve the center personnel’s ability to maintain the center efficiently, and automate manual processes.

To meet these needs, a team led by GE’s high-tech automation specialists, GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, and including GE Water & Process Technologies, GE Lighting Systems, GE Digital Energy and GE Security, provided a comprehensive solution that can be replicated in other centers around GE and in other companies around the world.

· Water – GE is providing a reverse osmosis system that transforms drinking water into high purity water for industrial use at the data center. The new water solution reduces water usage and chemical treatment, which is equal to $6,000 per year.

· Security – GE’s system includes access control, fire and life safety systems and video surveillance.

· Power – Digital Energy contributed power management systems, power quality, and power supplies to make sure there is always electricity flowing to the center.

· Lighting - With lamp and ballast changes plus lighting control the changes made will payback investment just over one year, then the savings go right to the bottom line each year after.

· Control – As automating processes was a key goal of the Data Center team, a contemporary GE Fanuc process solution that combines state-of-the-art hardware and software was installed as the automation infrastructure for the whole system.

The first phase of the data center solution will be completed this month with further functionality being added in the first half of 2009. The planned rollout will continue with implementations in other major GE data centers in Georgia, Connecticut and Budapest.

"GE Technology can address more than 50 per cent of data center energy usage from power supply, distribution, cooling and lighting, and its solutions can result in a 40 per center annual improvement in energy savings for non-IT systems," said Simpson. "By combining cutting-edge products and technologies with an expertise in Building Management Systems, GE provides customers the solid foundation for any high technology infrastructure."

Since ecomagination's inception in 2005 GE has developed more than 70 ecomagination-certified products.