Greening the Business and the Datacenter
March 1, 2008 – 4:00 pm
For some time, Sonic.net has been working to decrease our environmental impact and our utility costs. Our datacenter here houses a large number of servers and a lot of networking equipment in order to serve the needs of our customers. Reducing our impact and energy use is very important.
In addition to all of the standard practices such as recycling cardboard, paper, beverage containers and batteries, using recycled paper, etc, we’re working on some more aggressive changes. The largest of these is a change from our Liebert datacenter AC systems over to a new chiller plant from Bell Products of Napa. This project, a $600,000 investment, will result in large energy savings. Because of it’s efficiency, and the fact that we’re retiring the far less efficient Liebert equipment, this project has been approved by PG&E for a rebate of about $110,000. That’s great news for the environment!
We also met with city water department staff this week to audit our indoor and outdoor water usage, and we’re looking forward to their audit results and suggestions for cutting usage. The office drinking water is being switched from bottled to filtered chillers, and we’ll be changing some plumbing fixtures for lower usage. We’ve recently added two installation vans to our vehicle fleet, and fuel efficiency was obviously a goal for many reasons. These audits and practice changes are part of a business auditing and modification process that we are participating in called the Sonoma Green Business Program.
I attended the Sonoma County Business Environmental Alliance’s awards breakfast this last Friday, where they honored a number of businesses for environmental practices. It was great to see what other companies have been doing, and to get ideas about additional changes that we can make.
One Response to “Greening the Business and the Datacenter”
The new chiller plant sounds very exciting. I started googling “chiller plant” and started reading very practical information from LBL from engineers and professionals that mentioned many aspects of efficiency of chilling systems (with much data spanning many decades). What it makes us quickly realize (which you obviously found out) is that with bigger systems such as yours, having the right engineers on the project obviously has great benefit.
I knew I had a disdain for what seemed to be a sort of prepackaged system that you installed before, but I didn’t have the background to specifically come up with support for those feelings and/or alternatives. Reading about this makes me feel better that there are really real solutions from real engineers employed by companies set up to utilize them properly that are superior to the more canned installations from before.
I really genuinely hope that your chiller is professionally done, and gives you the performance you expect.
As an aside, I go to school across the street from Therma Corp (http://www.therma.com/), a pipe place (and with its own engineering, manufacturing, installation, maintenance, etc. departments, products and staff). How does that company compare to Bell Products of Napa? From my terse reading and very beginning understanding, my assumption is that with respect to the project you have, they are comparable, and that the main obvious benefit of BPoN is that they are closer to you and therefore are the right company for the job.
By Brad on Apr 12, 2008