The Drive for Capacity: How Energy Efficiency is Transforming Data Center and Telecom Markets

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GECritical Power

“GE’s Critical Power business serves the data, communications and computing industries—our customers are experiencing exponential growth and have an increased need for data; they really need our help—not only in driving energy efficiency, but also reliability, and to provide services around the lifecycle of the solutions their businesses rely upon.”

—Jeff Schnitzer, general manager, GE Critical

Power

THE INTERNET OF THINGS

The need for greater data, communications and computing capacity is dynamically changing current marketplaces in both the telecommunications and data center industries. Mobile usage continues its explosive expansion—both in markets where traditional telecommunications access had been limited, as well as through the expansion of tens of millions of personal mobile devices each year. Data centers meanwhile are under intense pressure to meet soaring data and storage demand, which is altering business models and forcing industry leaders to remain nimble to stay ahead of industry trends.

The advent of the Industrial Internet is also rapidlyincreasing the penetration of Internet-enabled devices integrating with complex machinery across all sectors, which further create increased pressure to reduce operational risk and increase operational efficiency. Implications for this proliferation of sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) capturing real-time data are that they will unlock new frontiers for machine performance; but only if the explosion of data volume is managed efficiently and cost effectively.

From 2000 to 2010, the rapid growth of device connectivity laid the foundation for the Industrial Internet. As of 2014, the first wave of Predix compatible non-GE machines came online, connecting machines, data and people to the Industrial Internet. 2014 also saw the launch of GE’s Predictivity—a solution suite that helps companies optimize their assets by increasing reliability and performance—contributing to longer asset life andincreased safety. At present, GE manages a portfolio of assets valued at $1 trillion, for which it tracks over50 million unique data elements using more than10 million sensors. As the Industrial Internet continues to scale up, this portfolio represents significant growth potential.

The rise of the Industrial Internet is transforming the data center and telecommunications markets, enabling customers to gain enhanced competitiveadvantages. To provide customers the appropriate turnkey solutions to support their expandingdata footprint, GE’s Critical Power business is

harnessing its understanding of data capacity challenges to offer unique hardware and software power delivery and protection technologies that can seamlessly integrate with customers’ operations—increasing efficiency, reducing operating costs and providing flexibility to scale as data demands grow.

Data centers are frequently mission critical facilities and cannot experience even momentary disruptionsto their power quality. For this reason, the data center space has historically ignored the high-spend on power that operations require, concluding that reliability and energy efficiency do not mix. As conditions have evolved, this position is no longer tenable. Energy is the number one operatingexpense (OpEx) cost in the data center space. As demand for data increases, controlling this expenseis one of the most powerful levers that data center operators have to impact their bottom line. JeffSchnitzer, general manager of GE’s Critical Power business described the importance of energy efficiency to GE’s customers:

Energy Efficient Data Centers—An Idea Whose Time has Come?

From an environmental standpoint, energy use in the data center sector accounts for 2.5 percent of the total electricity generated in the United States. With data center capacity expected to expand 33 percent annually over the next five years, reducing this substantial energy footprint is an essential

Understanding Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is one valuable component of GE’s business strategy to provide long-term value to its customers through energy efficient power equipment. At its most simple, TCO is equal to the upfront capital expense (CapEx) cost of an asset, plus the total cost of operating the asset (OpEx) over its lifetime. For a number of reasons, CapEx decision-making and OpEx decision-making are frequently isolated from each other, leading to purchasing decisions that tend to focus on the upfront cost of an asset, not its performance over time. Jeff Schnitzer describes how important a TCO approach is to GE’s data-centric customers:

GE Critical Power: Providing Business Solutions to Address Energy Efficiency in the Critical Power Facilities

“In 1970, we worried about landfills and paper waste, some 44,310,000 tons of it annually. Today,those things that were on paper now are in digital format, with an estimated 639,800 gigabytes of that digital information passing through data centers every minute.1 Forty-four years later, Earth Day 2014 reminds us to examine the impact data centers have on our natural resources and sustainability, and the strides being made by businesses and governments to meet new data center energy efficiency levels.”

“An interesting challenge in the data center space is how you manage multiple things: the upfront CapEx of the facility, the OpEx over its lifetime—how can you manage that without sacrificing reliability and the sustainability of the business? We believe driving the TCO down and focusing on all its elements can help our customers achieve balance and long-term success.”

strategy to reducing the greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) the sector is responsible for. Commenting on Earth Day 2014, Schnitzer observed that we have to take efforts to curb the impact our digital consumption has on the environment:

public, and civilian sectors. To that end, GE has taken an active stance on reducing GHG emissions associated with its business operations. Announced February 2014, the company pledged a GHG reduction goal of 20 percent absolute reduction from a 2011 baseline through 2020. When it reaches the goal, GE will have reduced emissions 40 percent from the 2004 baseline. GE’s critical power offerings—the TLE Series UPS system with eBoost technology and the ecoPriority source modular power system—are principal components in the company’s GHG reduction efforts.

Cooling loads account for a majority of data centers’ energy consumption, but significant opportunities exist to optimize the performance of data center hardware and software components. By offering GE solutions that have greater efficiencies than

Finding solutions to climate change requires the participation of stakeholders from the private,

“For the past couple of years, it has been all about the efficiency and the ability to get a strong ROI. Customers still want the reliability, but the customer base has communicated that it wants to be robust, but not overly-robust.”

—Ray Prince, business segment leader for the

Americas, UPS Systems for GE Critical Power

competitors’ products, GE is able to provide customers a substantially lower TCO over the equipment’s life cycle, because energy is one of the highest operational expenses in the data center space. Although each data center customer has its own unique needs—particularly regarding scalability and capacity— evaluating system architecture within the TCO framework can be instrumental to unlocking substantial, long-term operational savings. Helping customers realize these savings is a core component of GE’s business, and at a minimum, conducting a TCO evaluation is an essential best practice to properly assessing a customer’s needs. Ray Prince explains: “We like to see those TCO comparisons done on all jobs—small, medium and large—because there are sig-nificant savings. It’s difficult to say that one man-ufacturer gets a project over another solely because his equipment is $20,000 less when another manufacturer is saving the company $500,000 over five years on energy costs.”

Tension between short-term CapEx purchasing criteria and long-term OpEx budgeting is reinforced by the typical stakeholder division that shapes how the different groups are measured and what groups are accountable for CapEx and OpEx budgets. This tension can be further exacerbated when CapEx spending responsibilities are outsourced to a third party, where some of the priority may shift to finish the project “on time and under budget.” TCO evaluation for UPS equipment can be further obscured within the broader data center environment because most data center server and

Offsetting CapEx with OpEx Savings

environment because most data center server and other information technology (IT) equipment in thefacility have an approximate three-year life cycle, compared with UPS equipment that typically has a ten-year life cycle. The substantially longer life cycle of UPS systems increases the weight of the OpEx spend relative to the upfront capital cost of the system.

By offering solutions that prioritize operational efficiency to drive the TCO down over an asset’s life cycle, GE is revolutionizing the critical pow-er space. Currently GE’s marquee solution, TLE with eBoost, is a transformer-less, three-phase UPS that applies GE’s innovative technology to provide facilities with best-in-class operating efficiencies—up to 97 percent efficient in double-conversion mode, and up to 99 percent in eBoost (also known as multi-mode). By operating at such high efficiencies, the TLE platform helps lower system operating expenses and power usage effectiveness (PUE). In addition, the TLE Series delivers clean power quality,including low-input harmonics, high-input power factor and low-output voltage distortion to the critical loads.

TLE with eBoost has been adopted by facilities with critical loads in the data center, healthcare and financial services industries. The platform offers an unprecedented level of power density (a measure of the amount of power output relative to the system’s size or footprint), which reduces the overall capital expense of installation. With a small footprint, TLE is ideal for both new construction and retrofit applications where space optimization is a priority. As the demand for data continues to grow rapidly, maximizing the available space inside the data center through high power density UPS systems can afford customers the opportunity to maximize their facilities’ physical capacity.

The TLE Series UPS offers further flexibility by providing a highly efficient operating capacity in both the double-conversion and eBoost (multi-mode) operating settings, providing significant life cycle energy cost savings in both modes. When equipped with a TLE UPS running in double-conversion mode at 97 percent efficiency, a typical enterprise-class data center with a 5 MW of critical load can realize life cycle operating expenses up to $2 million when compared to a typical

Powering Off-Grid Savings for Telecommunications

The Future of the Data Center

double-conversion, 93 percent efficient UPS, due to reduced energy costs. eBoost operating mode provides further energy cost savings, providing up to $3.5 million in life cycle operating expense savings over ten years.

The importance of a few percentage points can’t be ignored when assessing efficiency performance in the critical power space. According to Frost & Sullivan, raising energy efficiency levels of UPS systems in data centers from 90 to 98 percent can save the United States $3 billion annually in energy costs. In Dallas, Texas, CoreSpace is saving anestimated $25,000 per year after equipping its data center facilities with eBoost-equipped multi-mode UPS systems, operating at 99 percent efficiency.

In the wireless telecommunications market, GE’s ecoPriority Source offering is helping solve similar critical power challenges on the frontiers of telecommunications access. The deployment of cellular service infrastructure in remote locations where utility power is limited has proven challenging; where deployed, these towers frequently rely on inefficient and expensive fossil fuel electric generators. With the ecoPriority Source modular power system, GE has enabled cellularservice providers to incorporate multiple power sources—including renewables—to power remote infrastructure efficiently, cost effectively and with a reduced environmental footprint. The single power conversion module can convert energy from multiple sources (solar, generator, or utility) depending on availability, and smartly adapt its response to match power source availability—prioritizing renewables and deploying utility or generator sources as needed. Working with Verizon, GE helped the telecom company to reduce generator runtime by converting their existing 20kW propane-fired generator to a solar-powered ecoPriority-enabled system at their Havasu Pass Facility in Needles, California.

The scalability of the ecoPriority solution can’t be ignored; currently, to power the world’s 640,000

The integration of data into every facet of our lives promises to revolutionize all aspects of the human experience. How seamlessly the transition into the age of the Industrial Internet occurs will depend on how the data center and telecommunications providers that will be the backbone of this new technology paradigm manage the anticipated explosive growth in data volume—optimizing existing infrastructure while continuously building capacity for scalability and modularity. While the challenges are demanding, technology solutions to manage this transition exist today, and can also serve as a powerful vehicle to address concerns around GHG emissions and to drive environmental sustainability. By embracing the principles of energyefficiency and TCO—and using the hardware, software and service solutions that GE Critical Power has to offer—mission critical facilities can turn the challenges of explosive growth in data demandinto a valuable business and sustainability advantage.

off-grid cell towers with diesel generators requires burning more than 11 billion liters of diesel fuel per year. In one application, hybridizing a cell tower with ecoPriority and GE’s innovative sodium nickel chlodide Durathon batteries cut fuel consumption 50 percent. With a considerable global market potential for off-grid cell towers, cutting fuel consumption by up to 50 percent represents significant operational cost savings for the industry while limiting greenhouse gas emissions from each cell tower.

1 Intel - What Happens in an Internet Minute?

BIOGRAPHIES

Ray Prince is the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) commercial leader for GE’s Critical Powerbusiness in the Americas. In his role as a commercial leader, Ray is responsible for the Americas UPS strategy development and execution, for both products and services. He is involved in all facets of the UPS commercial business, including new product definition and rollout, sales team mentoring and execution, large project sales opportunities, marketing programs, OEM partnering, application engineering, and aftermarket services strategy.

Ray has more than 30 years of UPS business experience and has held roles in executive management, sales and marketing, application/design engineering, and consulting services.

Jeff Schnitzer is general manager of GE’s Critical Power business, which provides mission-critical applications with end-to-end power product and service solutions to maximize uptime and system efficiency.

Jeff is an accomplished leader with acquisition integration experience, a customer-centric mindset and profitable growth track record. He began his career with GE in 1994 as a Manufacturing Engineer in GE’s Reuter Stokes business and most recently he served as the General Manager for Measurement & Control Solutions’ Bently Nevada Asset Condition Monitoring product line in Minden, NV. Prior to this, Jeff held roles as Product Line GM for Reuter Stokes and Quality Leader

Harry Handlin is the director of critical power applications for GE’s Critical Power business. The business provides customers across various industries with mission critical power solutions ranging from the building to the box to the board.

Harry has responsibility for providing technical and application support of electrical distribution products as well as integrating other GE businesses to serve mission critical customers. He also collaborates with product management and technology teams to develop new products for the mission critical applications.

for GE’s Energy Management Services business.

Jeff served in the U.S. Air Force for eight years and is a veteran of Operation Desert Storm. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the State University of New York, Buffalo.

He is currently the technical committee chairman for The Green Grid; a non-profit, open industry consortium of end-users, policy-makers, technology providers, facility architects and utility companies. The primary goal of the organization is to improve resource efficiency of data centers and business computing ecosystems. Harry is also an instructor for the Electrical Generating Systems Association (EGSA), and instructs field service personnel on the principals of parallel switchgear for certification.

Harry graduated from Auburn University with a bachelor of science in electrical engineering. He and his family reside in Birmingham, Alabama.

He joined GE as a business leader for the Americas UPS business in November 2010.

Prior to joining GE, Ray was the President of MGE UPS Systems, North America (currently owned by Schneider Electric), where he was responsible for all operations, including sales, services, engineering, manufacturing, quality, purchasing and customer service. Ray also owned and operated SoCal Power Solutions LLC, a Southern California sales rep agency of power quality products that included GE’s UPS Systems.

Born in the Chicago area, Ray has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he majored in power systems analysis, and was on the President’s List honor role.