Turning Up the Heat to Save Energy

19.01.2009
The temperature's rising in online brokerage 's data center -- and that's a good thing. The move has allowed the St. Louis-based company to reap enormous energy savings while increasing reliability.

Six months ago, hired the engineering firm Glumac to construct a computational fluid dymanics (CFD) model of Scottrade's data center. The model provided a complete picture of thermal airflows.

, chief data center mechanical engineer at Glumac, oversaw the effort. "Much can be learned from a thermal CFD model, and going forward, the model becomes an excellent tool to help determine the effectiveness of potential solutions," he says.

As is the case in many large data centers, Scottrade was overcooling the room. The solution: Fix the airflow problems and hot zones in its hot aisle/cold aisle configuration and turn up the computer room air conditioning (CRAC) unit's thermostat. That sounds scary, but Patterson says implementing the recommendations cut power consumption by 8% and improved equipment reliability -- all without affecting the performance of the data center.

Power and cooling infrastructures are a large piece of the data center's overall operating cost. The hard dollar savings from some fairly straightforward changes were "significant," Patterson says.

Scottrade didn't just reap those savings by retrofitting an old, poorly designed facility. Quite the contrary, Patterson achieved the efficiency gains in a state-of-the-art, 34,000-square-foot data center that Scottrade had rolled out in 2007. The cost benefits weren't just limited to power and cooling bills: Scottrade also reduced the load on backup power systems and reduced the number of backup batteries needed.