Green Data Centers rating system development at IGBC

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Need of data centers
It is expected that Data centers in India are growing at an average rate of 9.5% as compared to global average of 5%. Data centers have assumed tremendous importance in the last decade, as India continues to become more and more digital. They contribute significantly to several National benefits including the ways businesses are done, reduction in fossil fuel use by reducing travel for trade & domestic transactions, manday savings involved in day-to-day activities, IT enabled services, speed of communication, employment generation and several others. IT infrastructure and data centers are vital in translating the country’s vision of emerging as ‘Digital India’.

For more information, kindly refer IGBC Green Data Center Rating System. The Council is working on promoting sustainability in all forms of built-environment. Data centers have the potential to embrace green concepts and demonstrate their commitment to sustainability. Many data centers in the country are world class and already working in this direction. The objective of this rating is to set standards and enable the sector to emerge  as green data centers. IGBC, is a consensus driven not-for-profit Council, represents the building industry, consisting of more than 3000 committed members. The Council encourages, construction of sustainable built environment with enhanced economic and environmental performance.

The Green Building Movement in India has been spearheaded by IGBC since 2001, by creating awareness amongst the stakeholders. Thus far, the Council has been instrumental in enabling 3.84 Billion sq.ft of green buildings in the country as on August 2016. The Council’s activities have enabled a market transformation with regard to green building materials and technologies.


IGBC continuously works to provide tools that facilitate the adoption of green building practices in India. The development of IGBC Green Data Center Rating System is another important step in this direction. The Green Data center rating system enables construction and operation of data centers with enhanced energy efficiency and resource consumption and thereby resulting in excellence in environmental performance. 

What is the importance of Data Centers in Modern/ Digital World
Data centers have assumed tremendous importance in the last decade as India continues to become more and more digital. They contribute significantly to several National benefits including 
  • The ways Businesses are done, 
  • Reduction in fossil fuel use by reducing travel for trade & domestic transactions, 
  • Man-day savings involved in day-to-day activities, 
  • IT enabled services, speed of communications, 
  • Employment generation and several others.
  • IT infrastructure and data centers are vital in translating the country’s vision of emerging as ‘Digital India’.

What is Data Center ?
Data Center is built space where one of the following or in combination such as computing, storage, data processing, etc. are performed. The connected load/ power demand in data center is very large and efficiency & redundancy plays important role in defining overall efficiency of the data center facility.
In general, data centers are classified into four categories such as Tier-1, Tier-2, Tier-3 and Tier-4 data center.
There are several methods to evaluate the efficiency of data center, although, mainly, Power Usages Effectiveness (PUE) is used in evaluating efficiency. PUT is defined as follows:

Power Usage Effectiveness 
Total Facility Power Consumption (kWh)
IT Equipment Power consumption (kWh)

Here, total facility power presents the power measured at the utility meter - the power dedicated solely to the data center. In IT parks or buildings that houses data centers, it is necessary to have dedicated sub-metering for measuring the power consumption of data center and also load associated with the facilities. Total facility power measurement needs to include everything that supports the Data Center IT equipment such as:
·        Power delivery components such as UPS, switch gear, generators, PDUs (Power Distribution Units), batteries, and distribution losses external to the IT (Information Technology) equipment
·        Cooling system components such as chillers, cooling tower, computer room air conditioning units (CRACs), direct expansion air handler (DX) units and 
·        Compute, network, and storage nodes
·        Other miscellaneous component loads such as data center lighting
Whereas, the IT equipment power includes the load associated with all of the IT equipment, such as compute, storage and network equipment, along with supplemental equipment such as Keyboard, Video or Visual display unit, Mouse (KVM) switches, monitors, and workstations / laptops used to monitor or otherwise control the data center. The IT Equipment Power need to be measured at the Power Distribution Unit (PDU) level.
Establish the Power Usage Effectiveness of Data Center as per the above procedure and demonstrate that the PUE does not exceed the maximum threshold limit.

 What is Tier (Tier-1, Tier-2, Tier-3 and Tier-4 in Data center ?

 Tier-1 Data Center:

  • This category of data center is preferably used in small scale businesses
  • There will not be any redundancy in power and cooling system (i.e. single supply of power and cooling)
  • Definitely, there will be some downtime in the facility due to operation & maintenance activity. For example, 20 hours, 25 hours etc. 
  • Availability of data center management information system is the most important factor in data center.  As availability signifies the planing, control and operational strategies implemented in data centers.
  • In Tier-1 type of data center, availability is expected to be more than 99.05.
Availability calculation is shown below:  Availability = (MTBF  +  MTTR)
Here, MTBF represents Mean Time between Failures whereas, MTTR signifies Mean Time to Repair. 
Availability in data center must be as high as possible, in terms of 99 point 999 or so. It is not possible to have 99.9999. It is defined as per the classification of data center such as Tier-1, Tier-2, Tier-3 or Tier-4.
Tier-2 Data center

How to improve energy efficiency in Data Centers
IT equipment (IT Load) consumes significant energy in data centers, more over 60% of total energy requirement whereas, nearly 30-35% energy is consumed by HVAC equipment. Any control feature that is installed at HVAC equipment would result energy efficiency and in energy cost savings. However, change & alteration in IT equipment is rarely discussed. There are certain energy efficiency measures those offer scientific evidence to save energy at IT equipment by providing even cooling at server/ racks. 

 Below are some solutions to save energy in Data Centers
1. CFD analysis for Data Center Facilities:
CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) is a subject itself and provides tremendous solutions in terms of energy cost savings in data centers. However, it is very difficult to feed existing performance or feed the data of existing data center facility into the simulation tool to get benefits of latest technologies. To resolve such difficulties, simulation tools are developed which take inputs (building envelope, equipment load, lighting load, specifications of HVAC equipment) and optimise the energy load or cooling requirement. 
Cradle, Aperture Vista, Flovent, Fluent, etc. are the CFD simulation tools commonly used in optimising cooling requirement and thereby improving energy efficiency in data centers. 
CFD simulation tools can help in 
  • Diagnose HOT SPOT in data centers 
  • Even distribution of cool in cold aisle containment
  • Evaluate flow of cool air and pressurization 
  • Virtualization
First cost in data center is also high and CFD analysis at beginning / design stage can reduce redundancy, peak demanding/equipment sizing, energy requirement and operational energy usages. As CFD can help in reduction HOT SPOT and thereby life of data center can be improved.
Also, CFD analysis enables:
  • Long term viability of services 
  • Power and cooling management in a scientific
  • Offers comprehensive design approach 
  •  Strategic tool - Decide location of cooling units and drop ceiling location
  • Hot and Cold aisle containment 
  • Diagnose underfloor obstacles
  • air flow and temperature distribution
2. Electronic Expansion Value

3. Inverter to evaporative cooling system

4. High-tech controllers (to reduce human interface)

5. DC inverter compressor, which are proven to be the best for energy efficiency technology in data centers.

Some of the precautions:
  • Air quality should be tested in the data center frequently
  • Operation at raised temperatures as per the equipment (IT load) specification
  • Calculate Rack Cooling Index (RCI)
  • Measure temperature and RH at each rack level or at least every third rack level monitoring 
  • Calculate PUE of data center at 30% loading and 66% loading, as data centers are loaded over the time.

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