Company turns bad airflow into good cash flow with green IT

For Wade Lowder, paying attention to which way the wind blows has had an enormous effect on his green IT initiative.

An airflow study last year on a datacenter built in 2006 with “green” in mind revealed a number of issues and led to enormous cost savings for Lowder’s company, ProLogis, where Lowder is director of operations and global security.

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ProLogis, based in Denver, is a Fortune 500 company that leases industrial space and distribution facilities to companies around the globe.

The problems began when a computer room air conditioner (CRAC) unit failed at the company’s Denver datacenter. But the sheep-in-wolves clothing wasn’t discovered until the remediation, which carried a price tag of $32,000, but ended with the company now saving $10,000 a month on its energy bill for the entire building.

Lowder smiles when he considers the quick return on investment, but his smile grows as he realizes the benefits IT is realizing from that one air flow test.

“We were a little bit asleep in not managing some things,” Lowder now admits. “A datacenter is dynamic and you have to monitor that closely,” he said during his presentation at Network World’s IT Roadmap Conference in Denver. (Next IT Roadmap stop: April 2 in Chicago ) 

For Prologis, the growth of its server farm took off and caught them off guard.

After the CRAC failed, the airflow study revealed that the datacenter’s 2,5000 square feet of raised floor had problems such as holes around pipes coming in and out of the perimeter walls; poor distribution of power; holes in the floor under power distribution units (PDU), and misplaced perforated floor tiles, used to direct air around servers, that were causing a decrease in cool airflow where it was needed most. The study also revealed a hot spot at 95 degrees.

The remediation, which began in early 2008, included a model that showed where critical hot spots would occur if any one of the CRAC units failed. The company also installed blanking panels on their server racks and organized all cabling so heat could be more efficiently dissipated, which reduced rack temperatures 2 to 3 degrees.

Then the perforated floor tiles were removed from the dead spaces where installers had taken the initiative to place them randomly during construction. Holes were sealed around pipes and the holes were closed under PDUs.

By mid-year, the company was testing and installing more efficient power strips, installing a new CRAC unit and PDUs to support consolidation of disaster-recovery efforts. Thirty older and less efficient servers were shut down and a motion sensor lighting system was installed.

The next phase, which was completed by the end of 2008, included an updated airflow study to gauge the results of the changes made over the previous nine months, which confirmed critical hot spots would not occur even if a CRAC unit failed. Air channels around the server cabinets also were removed resulting in a 20 degree temperature drop on the hottest rack in the datacenter. And finally an energy efficiency study was completed with the local power company.

Lowder said the benefits keep showing up in different places.

“Our times between disk failures has dropped and we are attributing that to the temperature drop” in the datacenter, he said. Lowder said one important lesson learned is that IT and the facilities team have to work together. “Don’t assume all facilities people have operated datacenter HVAC,” he said.

And IT is now a featured participant in the company’s green initiative, which includes a chief sustainability officer. Now the attention is turning to reducing copy and fax usage, power management strategies, and green equipment disposal.

As a company, Prologis also routinely runs contests among employees to foster conservation. The results have been a cultural shift toward “green” awareness across the company.

“I don’t know if IT has completed its [green] transformation, but the greatest progress so far was during last year,” Lowder said.

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