November 12, 2008 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Australia’s Macquarie Telecom (http://www.macquarietelecom.com/hosting/) has cut its data center energy consumption by 10%, it was reported recently. The reduction has been made alongside a 30% increase in the number of managed servers the company operates. The savings are a result of the company’s overall “Green IT Strategy” designed to “improve efficiency and reduce energy consumption”.
The results were established after 6 months of Macquarie’s energy cutting measures and independently reviewed by The Frame Group’s data center team. According to the company’s calculations, and those of The Frame Group, the reductions equate to 600 tonnes of CO2 emissions. Macquarie achieved their energy reductions through “a structured approach to monitoring, measuring and subsequently standardizing the appropriate technologies to maximize power and cooling efficiency within the data center”.
“Macquarie Telecom’s data center accounted for around 90 per cent of our company power bill,” explained the company’s Managing Director, Hosting, Mr. Aidan Tudehope. “Our analysis showed that a large corporate data center can consume as much as forty times the energy of a typical Australian office housing 100 staff. Medium to large businesses looking to reduce their carbon footprint can make a significant impact by starting in the data center, rather than just switching off lights at the end of each day.”
After six months of measurement and planning, Macquarie Telecom commenced its full implementation program in January 2008 with a strong focus on designing for virtualization and utilizing a mix of energy efficient dual core and quad core servers, for customer managed environments.
“We learned a lot through trial and error in the early days as there were no Australian precedents for large, local data centers,” added Mr. Tudehope. “Now, however, we have a clear strategy with realistic milestones to measure our progress. Using virtualization, we were able to increase the levels of performance, redundancy and scalability for our customers whilst reducing the number of actual physical servers each customer requires.”
