Trinity’s Green Data Centre Leads the Way in Energy Efficiency
Posted on: 22 September 2014
Over 20,000 students and staff depend on Trinity IT services every day. With PCs, laptops, and smart phones connected to servers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the need for technology grows in the College, as does our carbon footprint. To become more energy-efficient while also continuing to grow and change with technology to meet daily business needs, Trinity opened a Green Data Centre.
Since its opening in Áras an Phiarsaigh, existing servers and IT services have been in the process of being transferred to this energy-efficient host. Over the next five years, IS Services and Future-Tech (partner suppliers) will work together on maintaining the data centre so that it continues to deliver reliable uninterrupted IT services to Trinity and to operate as one of the most energy efficient data centres in the world.
Commenting on the importance of the facility, John Murphy, Director of IS Services said: “The Green Data Centre aligns key College objectives such as providing a central enabling IT infrastructure with our ‘Green agenda’ to provide an energy efficient private cloud for the future which is centralised, has high availability and is scalable to match business needs. Sustainability and carbon reduction sits at the heart of Trinity’s future strategies. It was with this in mind that the College insisted its new facility could be held up as an example of Global energy efficiency excellence”.
Trinity's award–winning Green Data Centre was presented a 2014 National Tech Excellence Award. The ‘Data Centre of the Year’ prize was presented to IS Services in recognition of the data centre’s excellence in innovation, operation, awareness of its environmental impact, integrated thinking and how the facility was developed to meet current and future needs. In addition, the project was short-listed as a finalist for the Leadership in the Public Sector category in the EMEA awards for Data Centres in London last year.
“There is often a misconception in the data centre industry that small facilities such as this cannot obtain high levels of both resilience and energy efficiency, however, our facility in Trinity does. The facility at 100% capacity achieves an annualized Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.16 and at just 20% IT capacity the installation achieves an annualised PUE of 1.35. Achieving these figures in a facility that is built to a high availability (TIER 3) specification and housed within an existing building is truly remarkable,” explained Brian O’Hora, IS Services. “This achievement sets the College apart from any other facility currently built and operated in Ireland. This facility provides a bench mark for the design and construction of flexible, energy-efficient, high density data centres.”
The Green Data Centre was delivered by an inter-department project team consisting of the Director of IS Services, John Murphy (sponsor), the Engineering Services Manager in the Estates and Facilities Department, Kieron McGovern (project manager) and IS Services Networks & Infrastructure Manager, Brian O’Hora (senior user and client project manager).
To watch a video on Trinity’s Green Data Centre, please click here.
