IT Meets BAS

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The Green Campus

IT Meets BAS

5/1/2008

By Rama Ramaswami

Building a green data center or retrofitting an existing facility is a huge undertaking. What are the major factors to consider?
I like to think of data centers as three concentric circles of influence: At the center is the data center itself, where you can set up more energy-efficient servers and virtualize them to save space. In virtualization- the term comes from the mainframe world- one machine can run different platforms. Thus, the new system "mimics" the older one. You don't need multiple pieces of hardware for different environments. The second circle of the data center consists of users such as students and researchers. Here you can have thin-client workstations that use less energy, and with network power management systems, a single person can manage every PC in the system and shut it down when it is unused. In the third circle are the building systems, which are on separate protocols. IT generally doesn't pay a lot of attention to them. But facilities have fairly sophisticated operating systems, and there comes a point where building operations can really leverage the IT network to ensure maximum energy efficiency. Web services can let systems talk to each other. That's the direction in which IT is going.

How does the integration of IT and building systems apply to universities?
There are many opportunities for it, particularly on large campuses. Universities have lots of buildings, cogeneration plants, and so on, and managing that portfolio is difficult. The systems are diverse and operations is separate from administration. So, the data in each system need to be normalized so that someone can look at the entire portfolio of systems at the same time. Following that reasoning, building automation systems-or BAS- should be integrated into the IT network. This involves taking all these separate networks-for example, lighting, or ventilation in the labs-and integrating them. It's a different way of thinking about IT's role.

It's also a different way of thinking about the role of building automation.
Absolutely. Take demand response technology, for example, where customers lower their electricity needs in response to dynamic energy prices, or when a utility requests curtailment. The newest systems are automated demand response systems, in which commercial facilities can automatically shed load as needed. The next realm of thinking is when the utilities do this on their own, without the customer's involvement. But this requires a lot of technology, a lot of security, and a lot of thinking on the part of IT and building management, to prevent hacking or abuse. IT has enjoyed the safety of isolation for a long time; prior to the advent of the internet, you needed to have a key to physically enter the building before you could damage anything. That is no longer the case. So, BAS vendors need to make assurances to IT about security, and to ensure that IT believes them.

What are some other challenges to integrating IT and BAS?
Seventy percent of all data centers are constrained for power, cooling, or both. Many schools haven't moved to organize their data centers. They typically are shoehorned into buildings or scattered around campus, and are hard to maintain. If they've got the air conditioning going, the classrooms become too cold, and it's a strain on the electricity and cooling systems. By contrast, building automation is a mature technology-it's not broken, and it has a specific function. But IT is not used to handling building automation functions. Universities are not sure how much of a setback they'll have if they integrate the two, and I can understand why: What if they can't get things to work? In the labs, for example, climatic conditions are important. You don't want heating or cooling systems not working for a long time. But until the data center can take on the responsibility for managing a fire alarm, IT doesn't know the meaning of "mission-critical." That certainly raises the bar for IT.