News
IDC Architects Develop 5-Year Capital Improvement Plan for Global Data Center
By: Ted Johnson
Source: CH2M HILL
May 5, 2010 - IDC Architects was asked to produce a 5-Year Capital Improvement Plan for a major energy company’s Global Data Center. The plan will be used to provide direction for upgrades to the infrastructure of a critical facility in the company’s international IT infrastructure.
The plan's purpose is to improve the efficiency and reduce the operating costs of one of the key facilities supporting this company's global data management needs, which include providing IT services to approximately 150,000 users in more than 100 countries.
This project is an example of the kind of data management system upgrades that many large enterprises require as the volumes of data they must manage steadily increase. Whether economic times are good or bad, companies have to be able to manage large amounts of data efficiently.
There are many major global operations such as this that are eager to improve the efficiency of their data management strategies. Recent studies indicate that more than 80% of Fortune 2,000 clients plan to build or upgrade a new data center in the near future, and that enterprise data needs will grow 650% over the next five years.
Our company has become increasingly proficient in data center design and data center upgrades in recent years. We first assess a facility’s vulnerabilities and limitations. Next we develop a prioritized list of suggested projects to improve the facility’s performance, along with cost estimates for the projects.
A key area of opportunity for savings in data center operating costs is through reducing the power used to cool these energy-intensive facilities. We apply multiple strategies to help our data center clients optimize their systems for chilled water, cooling tower makeup water, computer air conditioning, fuel oil, compressed air generators, and humidity control. In other projects of this kind, our project teams have found ways to reduce energy consumption by 20 to 30% or more.