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Case study: Going green brought CRIS datacenter efficiency

The Indian Railways, Asia's largest rail network, is forever expanding and so are its IT needs. Where it ran only three or four mission critical applications in 1986, today it has 20 including nation-wide systems for ticketing, crew and material management, and asset tracking, among others. For the Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), the IT wing of the railways, this growth saw its datacenter guzzling power at an unprecedented rate.

"With the Indian Railways growing more IT conscious, CRIS' datacenter had an exponential growth in power, cooling and space requirements. If CRIS' datacenter design and equipment induction policy continued, it would have created a bulky, energy-gulping, unreliable datacenter which would have severely impacted our IT initiatives," says Surekha Sahu, chief manager electrical, CRIS.

To counter this, Sahu envisioned a more efficient, more eco-friendly datacenter. Her plan called for a revamp of the datacenter's design, a re-design of its HVAC and power systems, and a new level of consolidation. And it had to be done without impacting the operations of one of the most busy rail networks in the world.

The first concern was improving cooling efficiency. To achieve this, CRIS replaced a traditional centralized air-conditioner system with a microcontroller-based precision AC system, and re-designed and relocated air-condition ducts. The entire datacenter was re-aligned to fit a hot-aisle-cold-aisle formation and for more effect, blanking panels and perforated doors were installed in its racks.

Improving power efficiently was the next step. The datacenter's thyristor-based UPS, which was only 80 percent efficient, was replaced by a IGBT-based system, which is 98 percent efficient. The way power was distributed from the UPS to the racks was also re-designed. Finally, equipment that was shared across applications was consolidated and centralized in the datacenter. Ghost servers were switched off and removed and thinly-populated server racks consolidated.

Today, the Rs 2.3 crore project which went live has trimmed the number of racks from 100 to 62. The efficiency of the power supply distribution system has also improved by 18 percent.