How Telehouse will achieve 461 tonnes reduction in CO2 carbon emissions with EkkoSense

Cheryl Billson
PR and Communications

Nov 10, 2022

Data center operators are under pressure to support rising digital workloads while also being asked to deliver carbon savings to help meet corporate net zero targets. However, by pursuing a software-enabled, AI-powered approach to performance optimization, data center teams can gather real-time performance insights to support both increased workloads and secure quantifiable energy savings in terms of carbon reduction.

That’s what Telehouse, EkkoSense and CBRE have achieved at the Telehouse North facility. Results include helping to not only optimize cooling and thermal performance, but also to provide real-time operational visibility needed to secure a 461 tonnes reduction in CO₂ carbon emissions as well as a 10% cooling power reduction.

A leading global data center service provider

Telehouse is a leading global data center service provider, bringing together more than 3,000 business partners including carriers, mobile and content providers, enterprises and financial services companies. Established in 1989, Telehouse provides reliable, secure and flexible colocation, enabling organizations to accelerate speed to market and create business opportunities through fast, efficient and secure interconnections. The Telehouse London Docklands campus is Europe's most connected data center campus.

As an environmentally responsible business, Telehouse puts sustainability at the heart of its data centers. The company strives to enable best practice operational performance across its data center estate, concentrating resources where the most significant environmental improvements can be achieved. In addition to taking advantage of 100% renewable energy and complying with ISO standards for Environment and Energy Management, Telehouse already takes full advantage of cloud, virtualization and innovative cooling to contribute towards efficiency. The company recognizes that improving cooling efficiency is one of the most effective ways to optimize performance and secure environmental improvements.

Achieving clear environmental targets

In addition to meeting environmental goals, Telehouse faces the ongoing challenge of ensuring that its data center operations continue to support both its customers’ evolving colocation and hosting requirements as well as the company’s own business growth objectives.

Telehouse needed an environmental strategy to deliver against both challenges – enabling improved data center performance while at the same time securing carbon reductions. Telehouse engaged its services partner CBRE to identify next steps for its data center performance optimization programme. CBRE advised that Telehouse engage EkkoSense to deploy the EkkoSoft Critical AI-powered monitoring software. Backed by EkkoSense’s specialist cooling optimization skills, EkkoSoft Critical was considered an excellent solution to help Telehouse accelerate cooling and airflow optimization across its UK data centers.

The project goal was to secure continuous performance improvements around visibility, efficiency and resilience, with the initial phase at Telehouse North – the company’s oldest facility that opened in 1990. Target project outcomes included optimizing cooling performance, removing potential thermal risk, and unlocking quantifiable carbon savings to support Telehouse’s carbon reduction goals for 2022 and beyond.

Increasing the level of insightful data available to Telehouse’s operations team

The powerful ML and AI-powered EkkoSense optimization software works by monitoring, visualizing and analyzing the performance of data center facilities. It analyzes thousands of temperature and cooling points across the site in real-time to identify where levels of cooling can be tweaked, and dramatically increases the level of insightful data available to the operations team to remove risk and improve resilience.

Sensor deployment across the data halls provided Telehouse with the ability to monitor and identify performance improvements. If the temperature in a section of the data center is outside the normal range, the sensors will flag this. The EkkoSoft Critical 3D visualization and analytics platform continuously provides advice to the Telehouse team about adjusting cooling settings such as fan speed adjustments, cooling set points, floor grille placements etc. – resulting in quantifiable cooling energy savings and a reduction in carbon emissions.

The EkkoSense software includes 3D visualization capabilities, which Telehouse can use to gain a much clearer picture of where overcooling is taking place, the location of hotspots or any other inefficiencies that need optimizing to benefit their customers.

Presenting all this machine learning data in a comprehensive 3D view, makes it much easier to visualize the complex thermal performance of the thousands of racks deployed. With the EkkoSense software now collecting 3,000 data points every five minutes, the millions of data points already collected contribute directly to the effectiveness of machine learning algorithms to support continuous improvement in cooling energy usage and overall energy savings.

Unlocking significant carbon emission reductions for Telehouse

Deploying EkkoSoft Critical at Telehouse North has performed ahead of target and succeeded in improving quantifiable energy savings and carbon emission reductions.

According to Telehouse’s Senior Operations Director, Paul Lewis: “It’s very difficult to manually inspect every element of a data center to identify inefficiencies and make improvements. EkkoSoft Critical provides us with a highly granular level of data and visualization to help support our green agenda - and ensure our customers meet their sustainability targets. We’ve already made significant carbon emission reductions from our initial rollout of EkkoSoft Critical at Telehouse North, and we’re eager to implement the software around our wider campus to extend these capabilities.”

Addressing corporate energy saving requirements

On first engagement, EkkoSense identified that a potential 10% saving against cooling load saving was achievable from optimizing data center cooling at Telehouse North. This cooling energy saving will enable Telehouse to achieve an anticipated 461 tonnes reduction in CO2 emissions from its first EkkoSense deployment.

The impressive cooling energy saving at Telehouse North is a key factor in the company’s decision to extend EkkoSense optimization to its other London sites.

Fast deployment, quick results and rapid ROI for Telehouse

The combination of EkkoSense’s deep optimization skills and EkkoSoft Critical software have succeeded in securing a quantifiable positive energy impact for Telehouse within just 3.5 months from initial deployment.

The success of the trial has proven to form a new chapter in a long line of sustainability wins for Telehouse. The organization powered the world’s very first multi-storey adiabatic cooling system in 2016, its North Two data center is certified to the BREEAM excellent standard, and all of its sites are supplied with 100% renewable energy. Rolling out EkkoSense to Telehouse’s other London sites will help extend the company’s focus and commitment to ongoing sustainability.

Next steps

The initial results achieved with Telehouse have proved extremely promising, but this is just the beginning. EkkoSense’s technology works to continuously identify further optimization opportunities and push the efficiency of Telehouse’s operations that little bit further.

EkkoSoft Critical also proved to be especially valuable for Telehouse at a time of record-breaking temperatures in the UK. During July and August 2022, the software helped Telehouse’s data center team to successfully monitor and protect equipment and maintain uptime.

Telehouse also looked for the EkkoSense project to increase visibility and resilience. By massively increasing the number of thermal sensors and providing 3D visualization, Telehouse’s operations team now has a real-time 3D view into thermal performance.

This proved of real advantage during the summer heatwave, with the team able to immediately identify potential thermal hotspots before they became an issue. EkkoSoft Critical was also able to highlight areas that were being over-cooled, presenting further opportunities for energy saving and carbon reduction.

From the detailed optimization report, Telehouse has been able to track the energy impact of its Telehouse North facility in great detail, and is now able to monitor energy performance for its customers at a much more granular level. The organization is now exploring how the solution can be used to improve capacity management processes, identify any capacity constraints and better quantify available capacity.