Executive Summary

The use of green data centers is getting popular. Such centers refer to a repository to store, manage and disseminate data. It has two purposes to meet: increase energy efficiency and reducing the impact on the environment as much as possible (Rick Bauer,2008). The mechanical, lighting, electrical and computer systems must work towards these two goals. Building and operating green data centers requires advanced technologies and strategies. There are various ways to implement the green data centers - reducing buildings’ footprints, utilizing low-emission building materials, ensuring sustainable landscaping, recycling waste, enhancing indoor environment quality and using hybrid vehicles. Going forward, as demand for data centre space increases in an energy-constrained world, the need for the sustainable development of data centers becomes more pressing.

1.0 Introduction of green data Center

A green data center is operated with maximum energy efficiency with minimum environmental impact. The computing facility is constructed or built under green computing principle that will reduce significantly the operating expenses for IT infrastructure.
Traditional the power required to run the data center non IT equipment such as fans, pumps, UPS system consumed about 60% total annual energy of the data center (Gartner, Inc, American information technology research). However with the implementation of the green data center, the total energy consumption can be reduced annually by 15 to 40 %.
Figure 1 below is the key elements to consider for the implementation of a green data center. (IBM Academy of Technology, Nov 2012)

Figure 1: Key elements in a green data center

1.1 SWOT Analysis of Green Data Centre Strengths * long-term cost savings from operations and maintenance * offer employees a healthy, comfortable work environment * enhance relations with local communities | Weakness * expensive upfront costs * time consuming and complicated | Opportunity * get more credibility and recognition from clients * increasing attention from countries wanting to reverse the effects of climate change | Threats * at the mercy of unpredictable weather * the possibility of the green technology becoming obsolete |

I. Strength :
The amount of money that can be saved from operations and maintenance is substantial over the long term. Some governments are already offering tax incentives to promote green data centers. That will be a plus for the company’s profits. The presence of green data centers offers employees a healthy and comfortable work environment. The reduction in sickness and an upturn in the physical and emotional health of the employees will have a positive impact on the bottom line of the company. Companies pursuing the use of green data centers can see the investment as part of their corporate social responsibility as it enhances relations with local communities. II. Weakness
The upfront cost can be prohibitively expensive compared to the conventional data centers. There are various issues to consider, a time consuming and complicated process. The company needs to spend time and money to conduct energy audits as well as evaluate best practices. Different stakeholders may have conflicting imperatives for the company. For example the shareholder wants optimal returns but the having green data centers will drain the company coffers. As green data centers are relatively new, the number of service providers is limited. With limited competition, there is lesser incentive for these providers to offer lower priced services.

III. Opportunity
More companies are jumping into the corporate social responsibility bandwagon and there is growing awareness of the importance of environmental sustainability. Clients will look upon the company more favorably if the company runs green data centers. With increasing attention from countries wanting to reverse the effects of climate change, governments will roll out more incentives to reward companies which are willing to go green.

IV. Threat
Some environmental friendly energy sources are subject to the vagaries of Mother Nature. For example solar energy requires the sun. If there are dark clouds or rain, the solar energy output is in doubt. The company cannot control the climate. Having this uncertainty becomes a risk. Businesses cannot take this unpredictability. It will affect their bottom line. Secondly technology changes very fast. The current green technology may be obsolete just one year down the road when IT requirements change. This is a worrisome danger for companies who had sunk in huge amounts of money to acquire the green technology to run the data centers.

2.0 Case Study
2.1 Background of SingTel Kim Chuan Telecommunications Centre 2 ("KCTC-2")
(KCTC-2) was chosen as it is a good example of a local corporate titan which had prioritized sustainability alongside profit. KCTC-2 is SingTel’s data centre. It boasts cutting edge technology and provides reliable and safe IT infrastructure services. KCTC-2 helped Singapore’s largest telecommunications firm SingTel in various ways. It performs well. The use of energy is efficient. SingTel is able to manage its cost. KCTC 2 enables SingTel to respond rapidly to business needs.
KCTC-2 is huge. The data centre is located in Singapore and occupies 150,000 square feet of space. It taps onto the most recent data centre technologies. It gives a wide myriad of services to clients seeking to outsource their IT infrastructure and operations. They make it easy for the clients by providing a one-stop service to SingTel's end-to-end IT and professional services. It caters to all the computing needs of the clients’ business.

2.2 SingTel’s Commitment
SingTel wants to help customers save energy, reduce costs and drive performance. In short, SingTel helps to meet the business goals of the clients with their premium IT infrastructure and relatively low energy costs. With cutting edge technology, KCTC-2 provides a superb secure and reliable hosting network infrastructure. They have a big range of top IT services that taps on the most updated green technologies and best practices. That is good for the customers as it provides reliability, value-for-money and a business that is friendly to the environment.

2.3 KCTC-2’s Energy Efficiency Features
KCTC-2 has the list of qualities below that saves energy I. Green Building and Construction
Singapore Building and Construction Authority's (BCA) awarded KCTC-2 with the Green Mark Scheme. That is a standard to measure KCTC-2’s energy and water efficiency as well as environmental protection and innovation. The following building efficiency hallmarks are: * The building was built to reduce the entry of heat to a minimum * The building ensures little loss of energy through energy efficient and redundant power distribution systems * The use of infra red sensors to switch off the lights when it does not detect motion * The use of energy efficient lighting fixtures * The use of cooling systems that saves energy II. Green Best Practices The KCTC-2 facility makes use of best green practices: * KCTC-2 uses hot and cold aisle design layout to improve cooling efficiency. It also has tried and tested practices such as grommets and blanking panels to direct airflow. * KCTC-2 was constructed in a modular manner. It is increased only when the existing area is almost filled. This prevents excessive provision of energy needs III. Green Services
SingTel EXPAN has many green services such as: * Virtualisation of servers to reduce physical servers footprint and use space efficiently * Use energy efficient servers that give better efficiency and enable more servers in the same space as compared to conventional servers * Thermal analysis of clients’ data centre space to come up with methods to optimise energy and cooling efficiency through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) * Power reports to let clients know about their energy consumption

2.4 Major business processes
The business processes offers by KCTC-2 are: I. Colocation:
It is popular for mid size IT related companies. Running cost of the business in the company is able to bring down because they can take an advantage of just paying of portion of engineering set up with KCTC-2 s colocation service to host your server in the the world class data center. KCTC-2 also provide customize private data center rooms beside entry level rack space. II. Green IT Services SingTel EXPAN is offer convenient one stop services with highly committed staff to design an IT infrastructure according to your business goals. This helps customer to only work with SingTel EXPAN for their desire data centers instead of working with multiple suppliers. It provides cost saving advantages to the company because of better bargaining power when selecting more services with SingTel EXPAN.
The green technologies such as virtualization, thermal analysis and Energy Efficient Server offered by SingTel EXPAN could significant reduce power consumption and provide up to 64 percent more energy efficiency than conventional units(source: http://info.singtel.com).

Other services provided by SingTel EXPAN are disaster Recovery, IT operation and professional services

Figure 2: Services offer by SingTel EXPAN

2.5 Business strategy and relationship with external entities
More customers are seeking end-to-end managed solutions that are convenient and gives them peace of mind. KCTC-2 offers a one-stop service to help clients cut costs and boost productivity and competitiveness. Morever it is very secure. Another benefit of KCTC 2 is that clients can easily access SingTel's award-winning suite of end-to-end Managed and Professional Services. On top of that, customers can tap on cutting edge technologies from SingTel and its partners to meet their demanding computing needs. These include virtualisation and smart cooling solutions. It aid clients optimise their operations and make their businesses more competitive. All thes offerings hold SingTel in good stead as they vie for customers' businesses who are seeking their regional data centre.

3.0 Two Technologies
There are many new technologies are available to be chosen for setting up green data centers. The technologies chosen may impact on the energy efficient or power consumption. The new technologies are needed for set up the green data centers but they will not come cheap. Free cooling technology and virtualization to be discussed in this section which plays a key role in enabling green data centers. I. Free Cooling Technology
Free Cooling cuts down the energy and operating expenses of telecommunication sites. This is because traditional air conditioners are energy guzzlers. The use of free cooling can cut down the total thermal management cost by up to 90 %.( Source: http://www.dantherm.com/gb/electronics-cooling/technologies-and-innovation/free-cooling) Free Cooling solutions create a fine-filtered overpressure. Motorized dampers are used to make sure that there is optimum airflow in the shelter. It also prevents ambient air from going into the shelter or room.
Free Cooling solutions give the choice of total heat management in the shelter. The system controls the connected heating together with the air conditioning systems. Even surveillance and alarms are part and parcel of the Free Cooling solution.
The Free Cooling technology has been used for over 10 years. It went through 4 design generations and built up the relevant know-how. Low maintenance cost is required and certainly provides competitive advantages to the businesses.
Humidity is related to Free Cooling. Free Cooling is used together with humid and cold ambient air into an electronic enclosure to cool it down. When the humid ambient air encounters the warm air in the enclosure, it is heated. The relative humidity will drop. This will completely prevent condensation on the electronic equipment and will not cause pre mature failures on all these expensive equipment.
Free cooling was classified as facility efficiency techniques. Although it was considers as high complexity to set up such system, the pay back or return of investment (ROI) is also very high and able offset the initial capital investment in shorter period of time. II. Virtualization
Virtualization is one the technology designed to allow multiple application work load to run in a single machine. This abolish the method of dedication of one or single workload to single server. Thus it permits the virtualized servers to be function at the maximum capacity with the benefits of reducing heat and expense tremendously because of fewer servers are needed.
Servers consume energy and give off heat either they are 100 percent or 20 percent utilize of the time. There is no significant difference in heat generated and electrical consumption between these two points. This shows that the cost to run a server at 100 percent or fully utilized will cost as much to run a server that utilized only 20 percent of the time (IBM optimizing IT 2007)
Typically a virtualized environment is more flexible or resilient than a dedicated server environment. Any component failures in the system are managed automatically and the workload will be restarted. The operation also will be improved because the resources in a virtualized environment can be managed from a single point control.
The benefits of the virtualization are not limited to server. Storage virtualization can be managed by from a single center by combining storage capacity from multiple vendors into a single reservoir of capacity. Reduction of number of serves needed is achieved by server virtualization. Storage virtualization able to optimize the utilization by increasing the total amount of available disk space by reducing number of spindles requires. Storage virtualization enhances application availability from changes to the physical storage infrastructure by insulating host applications.
With virtualization, the efficiency of the organization data center will increase dramatically and provides a much more flexible way for the organization to run application with lower cost.

4.0 Conclusion

With green data centers, you can finance operations with lesser money without compromising on the reliability on IT equipment. Using economizers and looser environmental control can cut down on the quantity of energy required to keep IT equipment in working condition. These cutbacks will neither affect the IT reliability nor service availability. There are important things to consider when using an extended environmental operating range within a data center to cut down energy consumption. Factors to consider include IT equipment operation on top of data center and data floor design. All these must be factored in to successfully use an extended-range approach. Operating at higher temperatures within the ranges requires one to consider new operational, health and safety, and component-selection. The consequences linked to higher exhaust temperatures in hot aisles must be looked into. Many parts of the world can use economizer-based cooling and operate within the limits of the defined classes. This will minimize the impact on overall reliability as a result of short-term operation at higher temperatures.
Other options on cooling approaches may be suitable. Operators can separate equipment and use zoning to make sure that the strict environmental control can still be maintained where the need arises. Using the best practice of zoning prevents the reliability of critical equipment or services from being compromised. This also allows the benefits of utilizing a wider operational range to be applied to most of the green data center.