The HDC efficiency program is a local implementation strategy developed in response to the Carbon Reduction Commitment legislation and Morgan Stanley’s corporate objectives that pledge carbon reduction and energy savings. Morgan Stanley and Norland are working together to drive efficiencies throughout the facility’s operations and maintenance regimes. The HDC efficiency program has developed these objectives into a localised data centre implementation strategy to improve the efficiency of cooling which supports a higher density of IT equipment and provide a temperature stable environment for IT equipment so it always operates within the manufacturer’s environmental guidelines and demonstrate via online temperature monitoring at cab level and influence design for future white space build out.

Research performed by EYP/HP indicated that the cooling process consumes a huge proportion of energy; more than half of which can be due to inefficiencies and poor air management.
IT equipment consumption has also been addressed by pro actively encouraging the removal of non productive IT equipment, its replacement with modern more efficient hardware and application virtualisation.

The firm’s CEO and Chairman made a public declaration to reduce greenhouse gases from company buildings by 7-10% by 2012 and to become carbon neutral. This pledge, combined with the CRC impacts, meant that the firm’s corporate integrity and energy saving credentials were critical to its relationships with clients as well as in maintaining investor confidence. Having enabled automatic sub-level power metering and individual cab power and temperature monitoring it was possible to carry out The Green Grid DCiE detailed analysis.

The firm has Level 1 Basic, Level 2 Intermediate with a minimum measurement interval of one month but with alarm limit trips on a continuous basis and a modified Level 3 with IT equipment at Cab level.

PUE is a target metric that the entire workforce understands. A dashboard has been developed which records metrics on a monthly basis and allows a graphical analysis of all of the sub level devices. This allows an understanding of where individual items of M&E equipment may have developed a fault and started to operate inefficiently. Plotting these results over a number of graphs on a monthly basis from mostly automated meter readings, publishing them internally and holding regular energy updates is used to ensure continual validation.

Following research performed within the data centre by HP, Morgan Stanley were able to identify several initiatives which would provide significant savings in energy. To facilitate these initiatives the key step was to provide basic thermodynamics training to all of the staff working within the space. This was delivered in partnership with HP and pitched at a level that all the technicians were able to understand and benefit from.

In conjunction with positive competition within the team has meant that the teams responsible are actively involved in taking measurements, performing the analyses, and subsequently installing or actioning modifications to maximise the benefit from the cooling kilowatts.