Waterfalls and flywheels: General Motors’ green datacenter

[Sabre]

Ars Tech

Waterfalls and flywheels: General Motors’ new hyper-green data center
Ars gets a look inside at the first GM-owned data center in nearly 20 years.
by Sean Gallagher - Sept 15 2013, 5:00pm EDT

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A look down the completed "data hall" of GM's Warren Enterprise Data Center. With 2,500 virtual servers up and running, the center is at a tiny fraction of its full capacity.
General Motors WARREN, Michigan—General Motors has gone through a major transformation since emerging from bankruptcy three years ago. Now cashflow-positive, the company is in the midst of a different transformation—a three-year effort to reclaims its own IT after 20 years of outsourcing.

The first physical manifestation of that transformation is here at Warren, where GM has built the first of two enterprise data centers. The $150 million Warren Enterprise Data Center will cut the company's energy consumption for its enterprise IT infrastructure by 70 percent, according to GM's CIO Randy Mott. If those numbers hold up, the center will pay for itself with that and other savings from construction within three years.

Mott recently announced that GM's efforts to make the Warren data center's construction eco-friendly—including its energy-saving measures, solar-powered electric car charging stations in the parking lot, and recycling of 99 percent of construction waste—have earned the center a LEED "gold" certification from the US Green Building Council. Less than five percent of data centers have LEED certification.

The data center is part of a much larger "digital transformation" at the company, Mott said. GM is consolidating its IT operations from 23 data centers scattered around the globe (most of them leased) and hiring its own system engineers and developers for the first time since 1996. Within the next three to five years, GM expects to hire 8,500 new IT employees with 1,600 of them in Warren. "We're already at about the 7,000 mark for internal IT from our start point of about 1,700," Mott said.

On September 5, Jeff Liedel, GM's Executive Director and CIO for Infrastructure Engineering, gave Ars a personal tour of the Warren data center. While GM's needs are far different from that of big Internet companies such as Amazon, Facebook, or Google, it's clear that the automaker has cribbed from their notes on how to build data centers and how to create spaces that drive collaboration.

While it will be years before GM reaches the capacity of the Warren data center, the company has already begun construction on another data center at the company's Milford proving grounds. Mott reiterated the expectation that the Warren site will pay for itself within three years. The savings won't just come from the 70 percent reduction in energy consumption, but there's a "holistic" effect of closing the 23 data centers around the world from GM's days of IT outsourcing.

"In the IT business, you only get to build a data center once every 20 years or so," Liedel said. "We needed to get this right."

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Aside from its energy efficiency, GM's Warren Data Center picks up green cred in the way it handles its emergency power. Instead of using an array of lead-acid batteries to provide current in the event of an interruption of power, the data center is equipped with uninterruptible power supplies from Piller that use 15,000 pound flywheels spinning at 3,300 revolutions per minute.

The stored momentum in the flywheels can turn an emergency generator in order to provide power for up to 15 seconds while the data center's two giant 5,800 horsepower diesel generators come online. There are also two 6,400-gallon diesel fuel tanks—enough for the generators to produce three megawatts of power for up to 48 hours. These tanks can be continuously refueled to keep the data center up and running indefinitely.

I was surprised they only had two generators. I've seen high end data centers have 2N+1 for generators. That is a shockingly high raised floor though! Some cool tech for sure.