Advertisment

Airtel goes green

author-image
DQI Bureau
New Update

With our planet facing various environmental challenges, especially global warming, a proactive measure towards sustainable development is necessary or a path that can be followed by business organizations for adopting business models and product innovations that contribute towards environmental conservation.

Advertisment

The need is to have a business strategy which is social and environment friendly.

Bharti airtel, one of the leading Indian telecom companies, realized the need to upgrade its IT infrastructure to sustain high demands in the future.

To work in this direction, airtel continuously evaluated the impact of the services offered by it on resource and energy consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and waste handling procedures.

Advertisment

Logical Steps

airtel made sure that it had all the facilities that can help it to build green data centers.

Green data centers, which are environment-friendly and energy-efficient, use the state-of-the-art BAS system that ensures the building facility climate is within a specified range.

Advertisment

Water based chiller systems were deployed to achieve maximum cooling efficiency yet reducing the energy consumption. Compartmentalization of hot and cold air reduces losses in HVAC and carbon reduction. It also uses air balancing tool and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in the data centers which help in optimizing the air flow in the data center..

Other than this, the latest technology (IGBT based) modular UPSs are also deployed at these data centers which create less power losses. All DG sets used at these locations comply with the regulations laid by the Central Pollution Control Board. The data centers have a unique architecture-double glass façade used to propagate better thermal insulation properties, without compromising on daylight. Another major initiative taken for green data center is refreshing the old hardware with the new state-of-the-art hardware which is more efficient and green. This initiative has helped in realizing significant reduction in operational expenditure and increasing the available compute power.

 

Advertisment

To keep up with the latest hardware and software technology available in the industry, airtel has adopted the cloud computing/virtualization technology to boost its infrastructural efficiency.

airtel currently operates eight level 3/3+ data centers in NCR, Bengaluru, Chennai, Bhubaneswar, Pune, and Mumbai; giving enterprise customers all over India a choice of primary/disaster recovery requirements. The company has reported annual energy savings of 8.5 mn KWH in data center operations in 2011.

Apart from reducing the GHG emission and realizing annual energy savings, the company has also been able to achieve optimization and elasticity in its overall infrastructure by adopting cloud and virtualization technologies.

Advertisment

These technologies have helped to strengthen DR/business continuity planning (BCP) for critical systems. As part of the green data center initiative, it is adopting modular container based and prefabricated structures which are inherently designed to optimize energy and space.

Benefits

Green data centers are designed considering the benefits that the environment can reap. Since green data centers use alternate sources of energy and are based on BMS, they have been able to reduce the carbon footprints significantly. The initiative of sending e-bills over the last three years has helped convert 2.42 mn post-paid customers to the e-billing mode. This directly translates to saving 80,000 trees being cut down.

Advertisment

airtel's green data center is a repository for the storage, management, and dissemination of data in which the mechanical, lighting, electrical, and computer systems are designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimum environmental impact. Another benefit of shifting to green data center is that airtel has been able to reduce the dependency on fuel. Green facilities also offer employees a healthy, comfortable work environment, and the pleasure to work in the knowledge that they are contributing to the improvement of the environment.

Coincidentally, reduction in carbon footprints with the green data center has added a distinct value to the business of airtel through immediate savings. It ensures lower energy usage that can be beneficial to the bottom-line. The architecture of the green data center facilities is such that it reduces the dependency on artificial lighting and cooling, which ensures that airtel saves its fuel cost.

Besides, the green data centers focus on alternate sources of energy reducing further energy consumption for airtel.

 

Advertisment