Fresh Air — Natural Asset ReFRESHed

Abstract

At Intelec 2002 a paper entitled air - natural asset [1] presented BT's economic cooling approach to telecommunication equipment cooling and the developments that were being considered to increase the range of cooling products and lower the operational cost of these products. This paper outlines BT's continued approach to economic cooling of its telecommunication network equipment detailing how fresh air cooling has evolved with changes in operational philosophy and equipment technology during this period and in particular since 2002 including product development, energy savings, standards and telecom equipment. This paper will outline the development work undertaken to provide new cooling products that has resulted in significant operational cost saving. This involved working closely with our corporate suppliers in selecting components and turning a high level control strategy that included initiative energy reduction requirements into a detailed controller software that now provides significant operational savings in energy and therefore lowering energy cost and ultimately reducing carbon emissions over previous control strategies which themselves were considered ahead of their time. Central to BT's approach has been its continued support and implementation of Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) standards, in particular the environmental parameters in ETSI EN 300 019-1-3 [2]. In 2004 a revised ETSI EN 300 119 European telecommunication standard for equipment practice series was published that gave integrators a mechanism for obtaining data from manufacturers that allows them to model the equipped equipment racks and the environments they are positioned in using Computational Fluidflow Dynamics (CFD) techniques. This paper will highlight the changes to ETSI ETS 300 119 series and their impact on providing equipment environments. Concerns about the environment have increased significantly as the effects of global warming have become more evident. Within the telecommunications industry across the world groups of people / organisations are working towards energy conservation while dealing with the challenges of convergence of historically two industries, telecoms and computer. This paper discusses the problems operators have in sourcing products for data centres that meet the ETSI environmental standards and throws down the challenge to manufacturers to raise their game.