Reduced Capital & Operational Data Centre Costs

There is an ever increasing pressure and groundswell of opinion, both socio-political and economic, towards the conservation of energy coupled with a demand for the highest of energy efficiency standards from global industry.

With escalating energy costs, increasingly stringent standards are being introduced to encourage and if necessary penalise large users of grid resources through initiatives such as the Carbon Reduction Commitment.

All PUE figures include calculated electrical losses based on an external N+1 UPS system, N+1 standby generators, 2N transformers, plant ventilation systems and lighting.

Due to heavy energy usage and exponential demand, it is perceived that above all others, the Data Centre industry has a pivotal role to play – fast forward to the future and it is inevitable these pressures will increase as resources become scarcer and IT demand increases.

The BladeRoom system scores highly on all measures of energy efficiency.

It is cost-effective in capital terms, growing in line with the business and able to be relocated if necessary and so not carrying the 'built in obsolescence' costs associated with traditional building.

The dynamic BladeRoom control system delivers an extremely low PUE and supplies information to audit and prove energy savings, offering certainty that operational costs are as low as they can be.

Low Capital Investment

The system offers significant reduction in start-up costs owing to the scalability and flexibility inherent in the design. This enables the incremental growth of a data centre and allows the scale of the facility to match current demand.

Capital expenditure is drastically reduced and investment can closely track planned growth.

Future investment will only be required when new committed business or capacity requirement has been gained allowing the provision of 'just in time' data centres

A site can start small and scale up over time to match capital investment to demand

Utilisation percentage will improve, the service provider will not need to build speculatively and find clients. New business can be gained before rapidly bringing BladeRoom data centres online to meet the requirement.

In addition to capital expenditure on the data centre itself, this scalable approach to the provision of new capacity also means that the enabling works, site power infrastructure (generators and UPS) are also supplied only when absolutely necessary.

Controlled Capital Growth

The BladeRoom system offers a fast return on capital. Data centre growth can take place quickly to meet new requirements, allowing you to invest capital in a way that closely matches demand.

Removing the need to speculatively build large data centres on day one, sometimes followed by years of under-utilisation, can save enormous amounts of money and materially improve return on capital employed.

Land utilisation and purchase can be tightly controlled - the footprint occupied need only be that required, rather than committing larger areas to new build only to progressively occupy the new facility in a number years as capacity is required.

Provision of M&E infrastructure can be intelligently planned and progressively upgraded to match data centre growth, expending capital only when absolutely necessary.

This matching of facility to demand will produce significant improvement in return on capital employed and there are immediate tax savings and cash flow improvements compared to a traditional fit out or new build.

As an item of plant and machinery, a BladeRoom data centre is approved by HMRC for full capital allowance.

Scalable Data Centre Development

BladeRoom is a scalable data centre system, enabling growth to reflect the actual operational demand of a business and allowing intelligent incremental growth of data centre capacity.

Each BladeRoom data centre operates as an independent facility, designed for continuous operation even when capacity is being added.

This allows you to grow the facility over time, installing additional data centre blocks side by side or in multi-storey configurations without disruption to existing operations.

Click here to view the BladeRoom scalability slideshow

While additional data centre facilities are produced in our factory, suitable hard standing and external electrical infrastructure can be put in place on site to allow fast plug and play installation. This simple methodology allows you to grow your site very quickly into large multi-storey data centre complexes as demand increases.

Once a specification for a particular client is established we are able to quickly call off additional facilities without further detailed design work, providing significant time and cost savings.

The design fees traditionally associated with building a data centre are greatly reduced and future data centre facilities are simply organised through a single purchase order.

Low Power Consumption

An empirically proven PUE that offers industry-leading efficiency across the IT load range means that data centre power consumption is low from day one, even if the facility is underpopulated.

The BladeRoom system is highly energy efficient, minimising data centre power consumption by providing most of the cooling requirement through highly filtered ambient external air.

The humidification section within the Air Optimiser

Further cooling is achieved through the adiabatic section of the Air Optimiser providing both humidity control and cooling and using almost zero energy.

Offering a proven PUE as low as 1.13 including all electrical losses, the BladeRoom system can offer an 87% saving on cooling costs and carbon use against a benchmark PUE of 2.0.

Even greater savings than this are made compared to legacy systems with potential PUEs of 3.0 or more.

To meet current standards of data centre resilience it is essential that you have a totally resilient system for emergency or extreme weather scenarios. The BladeRoom system has back-up mechanical cooling which is N+1 and fully maintainable whilst live in line with Tier 3 requirements, even though it will be rarely used (Under 1% of the year in temperate climates).

The following graph shows a PUE comparison between a PUE 1.13 BladeRoom data centre and a PUE 1.8 data centre of a more typical design, both Tier 3 at 1MW IT load and in the same geographical location (in this example London: UK).

Click here to see energy cost and CO₂ savings with the BladeRoom System

Low Maintenance Overheads

Maintenance costs are extremely low with the BladeRoom system. The energy-efficient design has been based around readily available universal components and the monitoring system allows close management of the maintenance process.

The BladeRoom system has a minimal number of moving parts - a key feature in bringing maintenance costs down.

The integrated BMS and remote monitoring system tightly controls the operation of every critical item of plant while providing real-time operational updates. This allows genuinely proactive server room maintenance and the ability to solve problems before they occur, reducing the intensity of required engineering man-hours.

BladeRoom monitoring system site overview

The monitoring interface can be accessed from anywhere in the world (following a secure login) and will provide live updates on PUE, operational performance and CCTV observation through an easy-to-navigate graphical interface.

Engineers can monitor the BladeRoom data centre remotely via laptop allowing fast response times to alarms generated by the monitoring system.

Designed to a Tier 3 level of redundancy, major components can be 'hot swapped' without affecting operations allowing server room maintenance to be carried out extremely efficiently.