Corporate Express’ new energy efficient data centre
Corporate Express’ new energy efficient data centre
March 24, 2009:In conjunction with its recent office and warehouse relocation, supplier of business essentials Corporate Express Australia established a new data centre with a focus on its energy efficiency levels, reducing carbon emissions by 29 per cent compared to the previous data centre.
Mark Jones, Technology Infrastructure Manager at Corporate Express, said the new data centre was built on green IT principles with an emphasis on innovation to maximise energy efficiency and support the company’s sustainability objectives.
“The new data centre includes direct drive air conditioning with variable speeds adjusted to specific requirements, which enables running the facility at higher temperatures compared to traditional data centres. We’ve also used modular ‘uninterruptable power supply’ (UPS) technology to provide only the required level of power to each rack unit, minimising passive load and cabling requirements,” he explained.
Jones said Corporate Express was faced with capacity challenges with its old facility and did not want to move to a temporary data centre before moving to its new corporate headquarters, which prompted the company to virtualise its server environment.
“As a result we were able to reduce the physical server count by over 120 and remove capacity obstacles, which meant we could focus on building a new highly efficient data centre,” Jones said.
Together with creative uses of server and storage virtualisation as well as data de-duplication technologies, these innovations have seen a substantial reduction in energy consumption, reducing carbon emissions by 29 per cent compared to the previous data centre. This is equivalent to a saving of 140,000 kg of carbon emissions per year.
The Corporate Express data centre efficiency levels were tested and achieved a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of 1.49 compared to an industry best practice score of 1.8, proving its high efficiency and in line with Corporate Express’ sustainability goals.
The environmentally-efficient design of the data centre contributed to Corporate Express being named ‘Sustainable Company of the Year’ at the 8th Australian Sustainability Awards held last December. Corporate Express was also recognised for the sustainability features of its new head office and NSW distribution centre, its ethical sourcing program, environmentally-friendly product range, employee engagement statistics, flexible workplace policies, OHS results, community support and overall governance record.
Corporate Express is one of Australia’s leading suppliers of business essentials and has over 50 branches around Australia and New Zealand. The company listed on the ASX in January 1995. Its lines of business include office products, IT solutions, business furniture, print management, coffee, catering & kitchen supplies, promotional marketing, facility supplies and education.
Corporate Express can be contacted on 13 26 44 or by visiting www.ce.com.au.