Best Green IT Project : Cadence Design Systems : Datacenter Consolidation

Cadence designs CAD software for chip and PCB designing. They have a

centralized server farm compute infrastructure. The usage of server ensures that

the company is able to continuously innovate. This ensures that the company is

able to run huge number of regressions on the products they make before

releasing to customers, so that they can ensure quality. Before consolidation,

the entire compute server infrastructure was scattered across 12 small computer

rooms across three buildings in their Noida Campus. And a tremendous amount of

effort was required to maintain and manage the scattered infrastructure which

demanded the move to consolidate them into one large datacenter. The

inefficiencies existed not just in maintaining the rooms but also in cooling,

effective utilization, and the cost of creating minimum n+1 resiliency.

Availability, scalability and performance were the main guiding priniples in

their design. After deploying the new datacenter, it has given them 100% uptime

since May 2007 and the energy efficiency or PUE (power usage effectiveness) of

the datacenter is around 81%. As far as scalability is concerned, the modular

approach of the power backup solution has ensured that they did not have to

commission entire UPS power backup capacity in the beginning. As the datacenter

utilization goes up, they can accordingly add more UPS modules, thus reducing

upfront capital cost and wastage of unused resources.

Ashwin P. Rao Group Director — IT QWhat were the key business challenges that were faced while implementing this project? Cadence's Noida datacenter is the heart of production environment of EDA tools being developed and supported. Entire product R&D and support organization is highly dependent on the availably of this infrastructure. Consolidating the infrastructure but guaranteeing higher uptime and operational efficiency was a key business priority which the design and implementation team happily took as a challenge. Q What were the key technical challenges that were faced while implementing this project? Ensuring Uptime: This was one of the major challenges in front of the design team. They had to ensure that the project when implemented gives 100% uptime to the R&D production environment. Energy efficiency: Saving energy while creating this datacenter was always at the top of our minds. We wanted to save energy and make a visible green impact as a part of this project. Scalability: Modularity was one of the key mantra. Each and every critical piece of the datacenter has been designed to keep this basic guideline in mind. This was critical to ensure that we do not unnecessarily block our capital.

Plus the cooling is also taken care of very efficiently by using hot and cold

aisle design. They are reducing the shot circuiting of cold air thrown by the AC

and the hot air generated by the servers. This has significantly reduced the

cooling requirement and the company is able to set the ACs at a higher

temperature (for saving power and cost), and at the same time able to derive the

desired amount of cooling.

The overall datacenter is very nicely planned by providing redundancy for

everything starting from IT components to UPSs (two redundant bank of UPS

systems feeding DC through separate electrical distribution systems segregated

by a concrete wall.), Gen sets, local transformers, etc. They also have facility

to monitor power consumption at each rack level in real-time. They have also

used static switches for servers with single PSU. They also uses

surge-suppressors at every row level distribution and have provided dedicated

grounding system for datacenter using chemical earthling pits. The company has

gone to such an extent of planning that they have not allowed a single copper

wire to connect between the datacenter to the network. This is done to make sure

no shot circuiting or earthling leaks out from the production network to the

datacenter. To achieve this, they have connected the production network with the

datacenter over fibre lines. And most servers from the datacenter now can be

remotely accessed using cheaper home-grown webized management console using IPMI

and other related technologies.

For securing the premises they have used CCTV surveillance, biometric and

smart card based access control. One very innovative thing which they have done

is that they have made separate room for staging and repair work, so that the

service providers don't have to enter the datacenter for any reason. The staff

brings the devices to the staging room, get it checked and fixed and then the

staff takes it back. Similarly, for the telecom lines and equipments, they have

a separate room where all the lines and devices terminate. Any telecom service

provider to fix anything, can operate from that room itself thus reducing the

requirement of outsiders access to the core datacenter. Let's have a look at the

green initiatives Cadence has taken the results which made it to win the prize

in the green category of BIT.

As discussed earlier, the cold aisle containment and the consolidation itself

turned out to be the two major cost savings in terms of electricity. After the

consolidation, the company has grown its number of servers in the grid from 1000

to 1350 which is an increase of 35%, but they were at the same time able to

reduce the power consumption from 11,51,064 KWH to 6,93,792KWH. This means a

power saving of around 40%. The cost they are saving here is 20 Lakh per annum.

And not only this, while building this new datacenter they kept recycling very

much in their mind and as a result they have reused some 50,000 bricks, 65,000KG

Steel, 30 cu ft wood. Plus they have also replanted the 40 trees which were

there in the area where this new datacenter was being built.