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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.
EkkoSense Deliverables
EkkoSensor wireless sensors
EkkoAir wireless cooling duty sensors
EkkoSoft Critical software
Performance Optimization Managed Service
Benefits Achieved
Energy savings delivered
Reduction in carbon emissions
Removal of thermal risk
Platform in place for further capacity release
ROI
461 tonne reduction in CO₂ carbon emissions from phase one deployment
10% reduction in cooling power usage