Best Green IT Project : Aircel : Green IT at Aircel

Aircel is a joint venture between Maxis Communications Berhad of Malaysia and

Apollo Hospital Enterprise Ltd of India. It started operations in the year 1999.

Aircel is present in 18 of the total 23 telecom circles and with licences

secured for the remaining 5 telecom circles. The company plans to become a

pan-India operator in near future. Till 2007 , Aircel had operations only in 10

circles but it expanded its reach to 18 circles within a short time span of 18

months. This transformation enabled Aircel to become a powerful player in the

telecom sector. If we go into the details of this transformation, it involved

consolidation of Aircel's five separate datacenters into one single datacenter

to control operations all over Aircel's network. Before this, Aircel was facing

problems in providing interoperability amongst its different circles as

different data units had different policies and there was absence of a single

normalized policy. Green IT initiative at Aircel was taken up with the objective

of creating a world class Tier-III compliant green data center, green service

management and operations, green server and storage resource management

techniques and green collaboration techniques. All these initiatives were

separate projects with measurable KPIs,  which comply with global green

eco-system for reducing carbon emission, saving energy, reducing e-waste,

reducing stationery consumption and employee commuting.

These green initiatives were designed and implemented by Wipro Eco Energy,

the clean energy division of Wipro. The automation in IT service management and

operations process gave immense benefits by measuring the IT service performance

with all type of analytics/reporting and approval on Web and mobile. These

solutions have reduced the overall carbon footprint of the datacenter by over

400 tons per year. Few of the technologies implemented for green data centre

were-- Adaptive Cooling Technology, Geo-thermal exchange, Earth Air tunnel

(EAT), lighting solutions, solar thermal solutions, which has contributed to the

save earth initiative through effective preservation and reduction in climate

control variables. To enhance the datacenter's cooling system, Earth Air Tunnel

(EAT) system for fresh air intake was deployed in which the ground temperature

was utilized in cooling down the air that is been sent to the chillers to reduce

the load on the chillers. The basic concept behind this system was that the

temperature below the earth's surface is always around 26 degrees, so if instead

of drawing hot air from outside to the chiller where the temperature maybe

around 40 degrees, we use air passed through underground pipes then the load on

the chiller will be brought down considerably which will further lead to

reduction in total TR requirement by 20%. Plus ground source heat exchange

replaced the cooling towers which also contributed in higher chiller efficiency

and gave a very low water consumption advantage. There was about 20-25%

improvement in efficiency of the chillers due to geothermal heat-exchange and

Earth Air Tunnel system. In EAT system, four pipes each 60m in length were

buried 16 feet below the ground. Fresh ambient air is drawn into these pipes for

delivery to Air Handling Units (AHUs). This lead to about 6 degree Celsius

reduction in temperature of fresh air supplied that helped to reduce overall

load and capacity on the chiller.

Rain water harvesting was done, wherein run-off water from the roof was

captured and directed toward percolation pits to recharge the ground water.

Considering an average rainfall of 511mm, 500 KL water will be charged to the

ground Geothermal Exchange. 28 thermal wells drilled around the building and

vertical looping system is used to transfer heat from HVAC system to ground.

Three 20 tons GSHP are being used, totaling 60 tons for comfort cooling bed.

This has replaced conventional cooling system of 72 ton, thereby saving power.

In the cooling systems, refrigerant R410A is used instead of R22 or R407 that

has lead to reduction in operational and maintenance costs as well as carbon

footprints. Sensor based lighting systems were used for the data center and

sitting areas, which would turn on the lights only for the occupied areas. As

LED lights were used in placeof 36W CFLs to reduce the power consumption in the

sitting area by 26 KW/day.

Solar energy based heating system is also used to provide 1000 LPD of hot

water supply which eliminates use of conventional energy heating system that

would otherwise use 12KW of power.

Source: Aircel

As can be imagined, the entire Aircel team and business functions are

benefiting from the new Data Center. Aircel has migrated all of its OSS/BSS and

other systems to this data center. But the buck doesn't stop here. Considering

the pace at which telecom industry is growing, Aircel forsees the needs to build

three more such data centers of similar or even higher capacity. They also have

a roadmap planned for developing a public and private cloud for appropriate

applications. This data center is also in the process of getting a LEED's

certification.