We're thrilled that Dell customer Earth Rangers has been awarded Storage Networking World's 'Best Practices in Green Computing' Award for their work to improve energy efficiency in their data center. We realized Earth Rangers was on to something special when the company approached us to help them realize their green data center vision.
Earth Rangers is a non-profit that inspires children to build a better future by going to the classrooms with endangered animals and hosting school groups at their LEED Gold-certified Earth Rangers Centre in Ontario, Canada. In recent years, the company built innovative online tools that let kids learn through play. It's also enabling what I'd call "eco-social networking," encouraging kids to use social networks to raise funds to save animals and their habitat.
Earth Rangers needed to grow its data center to accommodate this increased online presence, but it only has limited space to accommodate its data center. The company wanted to lead by example and had set net-zero energy goal, meaning it wants to produce all the energy it consumes. To do that, Earth Rangers had to minimize the energy consumed in the data center.
Servers really impact a data center's energy consumption. They use energy themselves, and they require cooling which requires even more power. So Earth Rangers asked us for servers with great performance and a small physical footprint that emit the least heat and use the least energy possible. We offered up our PowerEdge M1000e blades, which feature high efficiency power supplies (over 90% efficient), low-flow fans and zoned cooling. They also feature dynamic power supply engagement, which lets power supplies automatically shut down when server loads are low.
Using virtualization, Earth Rangers consolidated its 63 servers to just 3 blades, leaving tons of room for growth and reducing energy consumption by 85 percent compared to a non-virtualized environment.
The really cool thing is that even the small amount of heat given off by the Dell Blade Chassis and other IT equipment is being used to help heat the Earth Rangers facility.
We're proud of the part Dell played in Earth Rangers 'green' data center, and we're proud that they have earned the SNW award!
Learn more about Earth Rangers' green data center in this case study.