Four years ago, when UK data center provider Ark designed its first data center in Spring Park in Corsham, UK – phase one of which was called SQ17 – everything was a lot less complicated. Putting in chilled-water cooling, raised floors, industry-standard products and Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems in a Tier III design didn’t require “too much” thought. Even adding free cooling seemed simple. It was a time when spreadsheets sufficed for monitoring needs, says Ark operations director Richard Borton.

How quickly things can change. “Obviously, we have seen the agenda around energy efficiency grow significantly these last few years,” Borton says, pointing to what he sees as the largest complication in data center design in 2013.

Borton had to face these challenges head-on 18 months ago when Ark set about designing its second Ark data center at Cody Park, near London, which became operational in May.

“We really had to understand what we would build next and how we would go about doing that to meet these new concerns – looking at everything from how chillers and new cooling methods affected design and cost to modular solutions,” Borton says.

The mission-critical focus of the facility had to be considered, with new energy efficiency requirements that call in the need for innovative technologies, and all this needed to be weighed up against the overall cost of building and owning the facility.

Predictive modeling (Ark chose the data center financial modeling tool Romonet Portal) was initially deployed to identify the changes in overall TCO and running costs new technologies would bring about for Ark, using metering data from the older data center and comparing this with specs listed for new technologies. This helped Ark make decisions on how to build its facility and then what to use inside.

But now, with customized processes designed with Romonet, this has allowed the team to negotiate better with vendors – proving operational figures for maintenance – and to ensure efficiency gains through capacity at every step of the process.

Optimized planning
The first deployment of Romonet took place 18 months ago. It helped the team identify the benefits of running with an air-optimized data center for the first time by comparing the benefits of vendor solutions with its current set at Spring Park, which uses the ‘IT-ready’ BladeRoom modular data center with free cooling technology.

“We did our modeling on standard chilled water first. Of course we found that air-optimized was more efficient because we are not using chillers and compressors on a regular basis – you would expect this. What was interesting was how much it would cost us to run a traditional data center versus an air-optimized facility. Just on the pure face value of the amount of IT load deployed, and the capacity of each data center, we could see, with a high degree of accuracy, that air optimization would be more operationally cost-efficient than a traditional cooled water system,” Borton says.

“We found the air-optimized data center to be around 60% more efficient on mechanical energy consumption than those cooled with chilled water and a raised floor. We also believed our UPS and chillers generated the most energy use [but] we couldn’t back that up with undeniable evidence.” Borton says Ark will now be using the software to look at further cooling savings that could be gained by upgrading its technology used at its Spring Park facility.

Ark is also adding data to the software from billing for clients, electrical consumption data and is applying that through in-house designed models to provide customers with information on their own levels of efficiency inside the Ark environment. “We have some clients that may want to operate in a different manner, so we can even allow them to put their components into our model and tell them what they can expect on an operational basis,” Borton says. 

Modeling has also been useful in testing. “We can now look at a test for the facility at full-load capacity using heat emulators and commission a phase in five days,” Borton says.

As Ark continues to grow, Borton says it will find more benefits from using modeling. Already Borton predicts Ark might be assessing chilled water solutions again as designs become more efficient. “It is the nature of our business. It is not about building a great big shed and fitting out bits inside; for us, it is about delivering smaller data center facilities on a unified basis using modular form, so our ability to adapt and change is important to us. We have to be able to meet the changing aspects of the IT and engineering markets to be efficient.”

This article first appeared in FOCUS magazine, Issue 32. You can view the full digital edition for free here.

Romonet will be speaking on data center commissioning at DatacenterDynamics Converged London, on Day 2, November 21.