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.