EkkoSense helps Daisy Corporate Services unlock savings of over £163,000 a year.

Daisy Corporates Services is the UK’s leading independent provider of secure IT, communications and cloud services. With a portfolio spanning Lines & Calls and Connectivity, right through to Unified Communications, Business Continuity and Cloud & Hosting, Daisy creates intelligent IT and communications solutions to help its customers in all industries to be more productive and successful, and plays an integral role in keeping the UK’s commercial and public sectors operational.

Over many years, Daisy has invested in building and operating data centre facilities to deliver a full range of cloud and hosting services, from colocation through to fully-managed environments. Daisy’s data centre infrastructure is mapped into the group’s business continuity network and is secure, robust and resilient by design.

Improving data centre thermal performance
Two years ago, in order to improve data centre performance, Daisy selected EkkoSense’s EkkoSoft Critical thermal optimisation solution to help manage the cooling performance of two of its critical facilities in Farnborough and Hamilton. Key factors behind this decision were Daisy’s determination to make its expensive equipment cooling more cost-effective and also to unlock further cooling capacity.

Implemented within weeks, EkkoSoft Critical® was deployed by the EkkoSense optimisation team to provide Daisy with a real-time 3D view of both the physical and thermal cooling dynamics of its two data centres. Daisy was able to ‘see’ their thermal risks clearly and, because EkkoSoft Critical shows the data centre thermal estate in real-time, could also immediately track the impact of changes being made to improve thermal performance.

The results from this initial optimisation process were impressive, unlocking an initial19% saving in the data centre cooling energy being used. EkkoSense also provided Daisy with a rapid return on its initial investment with the savings quickly covering the cost of the project.

In addition to these savings, EkkoSense also helped Daisy to secure improvements in:

• Thermal compliance – all data centre ‘hot spots’ removed to ensure data
• centres complied with ASHRAE recommended thermal performance ranges
• Balanced air flow – EkkoSense optimisation process helped Daisy to improve resilience and recover lost cooling capacity
• Cooling and air flow resilience testing – Daisy was able to benchmark its current cooling and air flow performance and safely test its cooling resilience to ensure uptime

“While the initial brief was to look at energy savings in two of our data centres, we were delighted that the solution also identified potential thermal risks from both over- and under-cooling. We worked with EkkoSense’s Optimisation consultants to make immediate long-term changes to our cooling strategy to eradicate this risk – preventing potential outages resulting from thermal inefficiencies and, at the same time, benefiting our bottom line by saving energy costs,” Les Price, Head of Availability Services at Daisy.

Unlocking further benefits with EkkoSense
Following the success of the initial project, Daisy then extended its engagement with EkkoSense to cover further primary data centres in Wapping, Aston and Romford. Again, the deployment of EkkoSoft Critical and EkkoSense’s data centre optimisation service has unlocked efficiencies, delivering a further £77,000 annual cost saving thanks to reduced data centre cooling energy costs.

Given this success, Daisy has also now engaged EkkoSense to deploy its software-led thermal optimisation approach at its Reading and Birstall sites, as well as additional halls in the original Farnborough and Aston facilities. Collectively, EkkoSense has now helped Daisy to save £163,000 in annual data centre cooling energy costs – representing over 200,000 kW of electricity and a significant carbon reduction.

These savings have been achieved by EkkoSense’s provision of a multi-year Managed Service to help Daisy optimise its data centres’ performance. In addition to the deployment of a comprehensive network of IoT-enabled sensors and the EkkoSoft Critical SaaS software, EkkoSense has installed and commissioned EkkoAir cooling duty sensors to provide real time tracking of cooling duty loads.

Exceeding annual cooling energy savings
While improved thermal efficiency has enabled Daisy to secure significant data centre cooling energy savings, applying EkkoSense’s performance optimisation has also been instrumental in delivering additional benefits in terms of improving capacity and reducing risk.

And with the introduction of advanced Capacity Planning functionality in the latest version of EkkoSoft Critical, EkkoSense is also opening up the potential for Daisy to take advantage of the software’s ability to track key space, power and cooling capacity measures to enable true live capacity planning functionality. By providing full estate-wide or room-by-room Live 3D views of current space utilisation, power usage and cooling capacity performance, Daisy will benefit from much greater control over its data centre estate.

“Working with EkkoSense and taking advantage of EkkoSoft Critical’s software-driven thermal optimisation capabilities has helped Daisy to secure impressive cooling energy savings in its data centres. The success of this project has encouraged us to deploy EkkoSense performance optimisation more widely, and we’re now seeing EkkoSoft Critical as a solution that not only positively impacts our energy usage and thermal risk reduction, but also is able to play an important role in the ongoing capacity management of our UK data centre estate,” added Les Price.