TINA VIENNA - Green IT in Vienna

Green IT in Vienna

Data centre of the City of Vienna

The data centre is the heart of the city administration's IT infrastructure. The forthcoming move of the data centre to a newly erected building at a new location constitutes an opportunity to reorganise and update an operational architecture that has grown over time and to implement high-quality, ecological solutions. The focus is on issues such as adequate power supply, cooling, sustainable use of energy resources, scalability, and availability - factors that are also important in ensuring the quality and reliability of IT solutions in the future.

Vienna's administration uses some 1,100 servers to make the municipal data and information infrastructure available to about 35,000 staff members on a daily basis. In order to achieve this, MA14, the Municipal Department for Automated Data Processing, Information and Communications Technologies, has been operating its own data centre for years, ensuring long-term top-level quality when it comes to data protection and data security, and providing a high level of data integrity and data availability rates of nearly one-hundred percent. The new data centre design, which is based on a two-site topology, will permit a redundant server infrastructure, while the high-performance data lines arranged in a double-star network configuration enable high data transmission rates and excellent performance.

Over the past 20 years, IT hardware has become ever smaller and more powerful, but with one drawback: it is also giving off more and more heat. The amount of energy needed to run and cool the server hardware has roughly doubled in the past ten years, and the data centre has now almost reached its limits. This is why the City of Vienna decided to build a new, state-of-the-art data centre housing high-quality infrastructure with an adequate HVAC, a reliable emergency power supply and ample room for expansion. The new data centre has been designed for power consumption in a range of 1.1 to 4 megawatts.

The fact that all computer server operations will then be centralised in the new building will ensure a more efficient use of the server infrastructure. The move will replace the current widely distributed data centre architecture with a consolidated and homogenous facility which will permit IT resources to be standardised and also enable the use of virtual servers. The move is scheduled to take the form of what is called soft migration, involving several stages which enable live operations to be kept up and running at all times. Once this process is completed, the sites no longer used will be closed down.

In addition to the well-established free cooling system (which takes advantage of the lower ambient air temperature), further energy-saving measures, such as cold aisle or hot aisle containment systems, will be implemented to cool the approximately 1,100 server systems. Moreover, the waste heat produced by the servers and the "reserve cooling capacity" will also be adjusted to the requirements of, and will be used by, the office building located above. These green IT measures not only demonstrate environmental thinking, but also help to cut operating costs.

MA14_01_Data centre