Energy efficiency and reliability transformation at the IBM India Software Lab data center

This paper describes a case study on the adoption of innovative technologies that enabled energy efficiency, reliability and extended the life of the India Software Lab's data center at IBM Bangalore. Essential to the transformation was the adoption of water cooling in nearly 50% of the data center including both at IT rack level and direct water cooling at the chip. The overall cooling architecture uses a high evaporator temperature, free-cooling chiller design to enable significant energy savings. The strategically designed ring plumbing architecture enables redundancy while allowing scalability with existing chilled water infrastructure reducing the dependency on perimeter cooling units which were reaching end of life conditions. The approach enabled a 48% increase in added IT equipment power capacity resulting in nearly 35,000 square feet of recovered data center foot print. The solution did this while increasing the data center infrastructure efficiency by over 15% and reducing the maximum data center temperature by nearly 10 degrees Celsius. To reduce the dependency on un-reliable power from the utility grid and expensive diesel generators, a photovoltaic-based high voltage direct current solar power system was implemented. The system used a unique multi-source power supply to enable intelligent, simultaneous access to grid power, solar power and backup battery power to supply 380 VDC power to IBM high-end servers. Using measurements of the solar power system output, and with government incentives, the solar power system shows a return-on-investment of less than 4 years.