There was a time when being an engineering design company was restricted to ensuring that the mechanical and electrical systems worked as they were designed to. This is no longer the case says Robert Thorogood, CTO at engineering firm HurleyPalmerFlatt.

Thorogood's responsibilities still include engaging with the clients in the lead into projects, taking them through concept and scheme design, making sure they are set up properly before handing them over to key account holders. Close to the end he reengages for testing of the design before hand over.

However these days many of his conversations begin and end around energy. Its consumption, modeling for use and cost over time and the potential for savings.

“It used to be primarily about mechanical and electrical systems, ensuring the required resilience was right for the business needs of the client. Nowadays what is just as important is the energy aspect.  Often it is said that the more resilience you have the less efficiency you get and while there is a propensity towards this, it can be nullified to a degree if you are careful.”

Demands are changing
With the majority of activity in build projects coming from the colo sector this has led to a different set of requirements as the colo providers themselves face new pressures. Tenants no longer take colo space at face value but want energy performance and carbon reduction factored in. Colos are responding and are having to respond quite carefully, he says.

In Thorogood’s view colos such as Telecity and Global Switch are assessing the potential impact of carbon cap and trade (in the UK) and are being careful about how they engage with it. They will, he believes, take a cautious approach, examining how it will impact their business each year before deciding a staged approach in how to tackle it. The new climate looks set to cause strain between landlords and tenants. “They [the colos] are equally interested in reducing their costs – it reflects well on them in the market,” he says.

New model army
As for the impact this has on HurleyPalmerFlatt, Thorogood admits it is pressure but says it is welcome pressure that calls for new disciplines.

HurleyPalmerFlatt is increasingly being asked to model for every eventuality in energy and fit out terms. This and other factors mean the lead times prior to clients committing to projects is getting longer. Being asked to report to ever greater levels of detail is a product of a nervous market and Thorogood accepts it as the price of doing business in the current climate. But, he says there is only so far anyone can go. The caveat is that predicting end user behaviour is always difficult.

In order to approach sustainability correctly (the company bought consultancy ATCO earlier this year) it is necessary to get all the modeling done properly. This is about reaching a true understanding of  what does work and what doesn’t. The objective is to arrive at an understanding of what is going to reduce carbon.

The pain, says Thorogood, is in being able to model a facility in sufficient detail so that you can build one that will work for 10 or 15 years hence. The difficulty with models of this sort in the colo space is knowing when an end user wants to install his kit. "What is his build out rate because if it is very slow the need to mimic that from a build point of view is vital so that modules don’t get so big that PUE numbers start going off the chart."

“If you build a 10,000 sq ft data hall and only use 2,000 sq ft of it you will get punished in PUE terms.”

But some users will want a load of 50% plus on day one, therefore the approach completely changes. Modeling exactly to IT build out is very important.

One approach to energy management is is to go down the Tri Gen route says Thorogood. Though this won't suit all projects the advantage is that you are modeling from when the gas goes on. It is a very complex model – there is a lot of pain but the benefits are that you are effectively calculating your energy costs over time. You can be much more certain about what you are paying – you can fix the cost of energy against gas or electrical coast – you have more certainty about what you are going to pay over time, he says.

Modular and Granular  
From three years ago the market has flipped from 75% of projects coming from owner operators to colos now accounting approximately three quarters of projects.

 And the additional pressures of energy concerns are not totally welcome.

For an end user tenant moving to a colo is about postponing cost to the business (moving what was a capex to an opex spend) but never about totally removing it (over time it can cost more to buy than to build).

Just as tenants want granular reporting from a design aspect one trend that he sees continuing is going modular. Although suspicions and difficulties remain – mostly on the facilities side – these are being tackled.

It has always been a preference to go modular but it has been difficult to do on the infrastructure facilities. You can do it on CRAC units, UPSs and PDUs but the difficult piece is the generation and the chillers. They tend to be bigger lumps of kit and moving those down to a modular level while keeping an eye on the capital cost is difficult, he says.

Thorogood says he has recently worked on a project where he had used 250KW chillers. This is a lot smaller form factor, down from 1,000 to 1,5000 KW chillers which were the norm for the past few years. “So the cost per KW is slightly higher but we managed to reduce the incremental cost,” he says.

However it is still not without a premium “With generation it is still an issue. You can buy smaller sets but when you look at your NPV over time it will cost you to go smaller.”

Managed hosting and managed cost
That is not to say that all starting points are the same and not all projects involve loading out brand new facilities. In today's climate there are lots of legacy data centers where they are trying to cut energy now before looking to building anything new. Capex is difficult to secure and they want spending in smaller chunks, he says.

"There are people with existing data centers who want to be able to reduce energy by looking at how they can apply things directly today. So they might have Crac units that are 5 – 10 years old and they won’t have variable speed fans or EC drives and so they’ll put those in and get almost instantaneous cut in energy by going form a 7KW motor to a 5KW motor. People can then look at cold aisles but that is more difficult. You might have legacy equipment which can’t handle it or you might a problem with the layout as sometimes the cabinets don’t lend themselves to things like that. If you have a chiller that is ten years old, you can probably do a very quick lifecycle cost analysis of changing that out and bringing in a free cooling chiller," he says.

Today in sectors such as financial services and public sector the preference is buy over build. This will continue for several years yet as the economy stabilizes.

However in both retail hosting and colo the landlord/tenant relationships are already being affected as pressures on energy costs, metering and carbon reduction and responsibility come to the fore.

Factoring in these pressures is what is being asked of firms such as HurleyPalmerFlatt. And when the economic dust settles and the capital markets free up, believes Thorogood, the pressure on end users to start building again for themselves will return. 


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