The Enterprise Data Center rarely seeks the spotlight. 

“If our customers don’t know we’re here, we’re doing our job,” says data center manager Myke Welch. 

Yet the center has achieved something anyone would envy: In the past three years, it’s cut its energy consumption in half and watched monthly electricity costs plummet from an estimated $6,000 to less than $3,000.

The 2,600 square-foot facility houses the university’s “enterprise-level” computing functions: Outlook e-mail, Blackboard, Banner, top-level UNH websites, and storage, among others. It runs 24/7, requires a high level of monitoring and security, and boasts 34 racks of servers that need careful climate control.  

Welch attributes the increased efficiency to several factors. Changes in how they cool the heat-generating servers account for a large share of the energy savings. Not only has cooling equipment improved in efficiency, says Welch, but his team dialed back the cooling, challenging conventional wisdom that an ambient temperature in the 60s was necessary. They improved airflow around servers and increased their density, to focus cooling efforts on a smaller area.

Virtualization technology, which reduces the need for physical servers, helped save energy, as did improvements that increase efficiency of servers themselves. 

“Computer manufacturers are recognizing that people want efficient computers,” Welch says.  

 The efficiency work involved UNH undergraduates as well. “To validate some of our design ideas, we collaborated with a Concord based firm called CoolSim who organized a team of UNH mechanical engineering students to model our facility and run simulations for their senior project,” Welch says. “UNH students helped IT become a lot more efficient.”