CGI’s data centres – Energy-saving renovations

Coromatic carried out energy-saving renovations in CGI’s data centres. CGI listened to its customers and further improved energy efficiency in its data centres. The renovation started in small steps to see what benefits could be achieved through cooling optimisation.

Since the results were even better than expected, CGI decided to upgrade its entire cooling supply chain stage by stage.

Today’s customers demand security and environmental friendliness from data centre service providers. Meanwhile, the service provider has to find ways to save costs without compromising usability and security. All of these goals were achieved in the energy-saving renovation carried out for CGI: cost savings in energy consumption, a better power usage effectiveness (PUE) value and a more fault-tolerant cooling system.

We were able to reduce our consumption for cooling supply to the data centre by 25%. Since cooling accounts for 30% of our entire electricity bill, this produces significant savings. We achieved significant improvements through cooling optimisation by using the latest technology and Coromatic’s expertise,” said Juha Snellman, Production Director at CGI.

One of our optimisation goals was to extend the free cooling period by adjusting cooling water temperatures in such a manner that liquid coolers are able to produce the necessary cooling water without water coolers.

As a result of this optimisation, we managed to prolong the free cooling period by 2.5 months.

“The energy-saving renovations in our data centres paid themselves back in approximately 12 months and we achieved all of our optimisation goals. Furthermore, we managed to increase heat recovery efficiency to the extent that we now heat the entire 42,000 square metre office building with waste heat from the data centre,” Juha Snellman explains.

Continuous development in data centre services

CGI currently has seven data centres in Finland but, in line with the common trend, plans to consolidate them to two locations in the Helsinki metropolitan area. These two are Enterprise Hub and N+1 level data centres which both achieve the PUE target range set by CGI.

Even the data centre’s end users benefit from this since it translates to reduced data centre maintenance costs and improved environmental friendliness.

The nominal capacity of CGI’s data centres in Finland is over two megawatts. One of them is a disaster recovery data centre that is situated in a rock cave. These data centres house critical systems of several international companies and public sector organisations.

“Security and system availability is increasingly emphasised as more and more critical information is stored online. The most important thing for us is to is to secure the customer’s data. Therefore, reliable data centre technology, and securing it, has become increasingly critical,” Snellman said.

All of the services are duplicated, and on-call services for critical systems are handled by CGI’s own personnel. A monitoring centre, service centre and failure management are on call on a 24/7 basis. All core functions are handled by own personnel, which further increases the security of operations.

The best results by choosing the right partner

CGI applies strict criteria in selecting its suppliers. Therefore, the cooling optimisation project in the first data centre was supposed to indicate whether cooperation with Coromatic was sufficiently smooth to proceed any further. However, Coromatic met CGI’s quality criteria, and cooperation turned into partnership. Following the cooling optimisation, Coromatic upgraded other infrastructure in the data centre and updated the electricity supply. The data centre was fully operational throughout these renovations.

“Already at the early stages of cooperation, we were convinced by the skills and quality of work by Coromatic’s staff. We wanted to choose a partner that is able to serve us with a broad range of products and services. CGI already cooperated with Coromatic in several Nordic Countries, which further convinced us,” said Juha Snellman. “Here in Finland, we have now cooperated with Coromatic for over a year,” he said.

Founded in 1976, CGI is globally the 5th largest and Finland’s 2nd largest independent ICT service company. It employs 68,000 experts in over 40 countries, serving thousands of customers worldwide. In Finland, CGI has 3,500 employees in 16 locations.

CGI provides consultancy services for the development of business and ICT solutions, integrates and develops information systems and acts as outsourcing partner for its customers.

CGI’s combined annualised revenue is over USD 10 billion, and its shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: GIB.A) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: GIB).