It was time to discard old setups and bring in the new for Godfrey Phillips India, when it decided to revamp its data center power and cooling with a long-term vision in mind. Godfrey
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Phillips operates in the consumer
industry, manufacturing tobacco, cigarettes and tea. The company was incorporated in 1936, and is
headquartered in New Delhi. It has manufacturing facilities in Delhi and Mumbai.
In 2009, Godfrey Phillips decided to upgrade its data center. At this point of time, it was decided
that the data
center power and cooling setup also needed a change. "It was time for us to change the earlier
AC setup, because that was very old. The upgradation of the data center struck us as the right
opportunity to do so. We convinced the management that it would be better to spend a little more
money, as it would also give us reliability," says S R Balasubramanian, the company's executive
vice president for IT & corporate development. Another reason was to avoid using the extra
power used to cool the data center. The air-conditioning load was 10 kW and since it was being run
24/7, which became a challenge on the data
center power front, especially in the summers of Delhi. Also, there was the major challenge of
maintaining the right temperature with the older ACs.
At present, Godfrey Phillips procures data
center power from the Delhi State Electricity Board. Apart from that there are backup
generators. These generators are handled by the administration department. The company uses
Kirloskar generators with N+1 redundancy.
When it came to cooling the data center, Godfrey Phillips went in for precision cooling from Tata
Liebert. As Balasubramanian explains: "It helped in avoiding the use of extra power to cool the
data center." Before putting precision cooling in place, the data center had a general cooling
setup. In precision cooling, the cool air is directly supplied from below the racks, thus
eliminating the need to cool the external environment.
Keeping data
center power savings in mind, the organization also decided to go in for blade servers from HP,
because the overall power consumption of blade servers is much lower compared to rack ones. There
are in all four server racks, with partitions between the racks. If the data center cooling
requirement is fixed at room temperature, certain space between the racks is required. This is not
required in the case of precision cooling, since cooling is provided within the racks.
There are multiple benefits of cooling the data center at rack or server levels. To begin with,
there is less heat retention of the disk and motherboard. Also, I/Os become less, considerably
reducing data
center power consumption.
Another initiative taken by the company to optimize data center
power utilization has been server virtualization, which has successfully reduced power
consumption by almost 40%. The data center
power consumption was around 14.5 kW prior to server virtualization. Post-virtualization, it
has changed to 10.2 kW. Right now, Godfrey Phillips has put in a constant running temperature of 20
Degree Celsius. Since July 2009, there has been no major fluctuation in the data center
temperature. It will be two degrees plus or minus, but nothing major, says Balasubramanian.
As of now, Godfrey Phillips is not planning to use any water chillers due to their costly nature.
Also, if there's a space constraint, a data center cannot go for that option. In such cases,
precision cooling is a better option to power savings.