Ed Butler, CEO of Amito, talks about how Power Control helped the data centre to achieve an industry leading PUE of 1.2, and his experience in working with Power Control in this video case study.

Video transcript:
I’m Ed Butler, I’m the CEO of Amito and I’m also the founder so it’s a business I started some time ago now back in 2011

Amito is a digital infrastructure provider, we focus on data centres and also cloud hosting. We operate Readings largest data centre and we also have a cloud platform in 27 data centres around the world.

Our Power Control relationship goes back to 2012, or maybe even slightly earlier. The relationship was established in the design phase of the data centre and it’s been in place ever since

Energy efficiency is absolutely key, apart from the obvious environmental concerns with energy usage, it’s a huge economic impact so the energy usage of a data centre is roughly 80% of the total cost. If you look at all the components in a data centre where you have inefficiencies. The UPS is probably the second largest contributor to that and that something that we have focussed on and why we have made this investment.

We have gone from a static configuration which is essentially a monolithic big block of UPS to a modular configuration where it’s more akin to a single frame that has individual small UPS put into. So it’s got a number of benefits for us, probably the benefit that we are most keen on is the redundancy and resiliency. In that configuration, if one of the modules fails, it doesn’t have any operational impact and that’s really great from a customer service point of view.

There are 2 key drivers behind that, 1 is people are understandably concerned about their carbon footprint so they want to be choosing a data centre that is carbon neutral and secondly, the energy cost is the biggest component of a data centre so we believe we have one of the most efficient enterprise-class colocation data centres in the UK. Being one of the most efficient means we can pass those efficiencies on to our end users and they end up getting a better service and it’s a more economic alternative.

What we’ve seen with the new UPS has been a significant reduction in physical footprint so we have more space in our plant rooms to do other things. There is also less weight and it’s one of those considerations that goes into a data centre in terms of structural and fabric costs. Even smaller things like lower noise, lower airflow speeds. So it’s one of those things where you have a virtues circle where all of those things feed into each other.

The primary focus was energy efficiency. We’ve gone from operating at a PUE of 1.20 and I should make it clear that’s an actual PUE that we are operating at, and we’ve gone to 1.12. The PUE saving translates into energy reduction and we’ve quantified it in terms of CO2 and its equivalent to about 110,000kg of CO2 reduction per year. So it’s a really significant environmental impact as well.

We’ve been through a number of different design changes to the data centre and improvements. Power Control has been present throughout that period so I’d say it’s a very good relationship.

For more information about Power Control and the products and services we offer please call 01246 431431 or email info@powercontrol.co.uk