BT strives for datacentre efficiency

IT Week: What does your job as BT’s global head of datacentres involve?

O’Donnell: I am responsible for 1,400 full-time staff and contractors employed in 80 datacentres. As well as responsibility for the datacentres, I have two other jobs: running all the IT systems and IT support for BT on a global basis; and helping to ensure that we are energy efficient and reduce our carbon footprint. It is important to ensure that all our systems and our 7,000 points of presence, network nodes and exchanges continue to operate, and to recognise that some of them are critical. BT is one of two carriers in the UK that provide 999 services, for example, the other being Cable & Wireless. An important part of the job is making sure that when people ring the ambulance, fire or police services, their call gets through.

Are you confident that you can keep all these mission-critical datacentres running 365 days a year?

A couple of things worry me. My long-term worry is that there has not been sufficient investment in the UK power grid since the electrical distribution network was privatised. Consequently, I fear that we will run out of capacity. My short-term worry is a major terrorist attack. That would be about the worst thing that could happen, though we are pretty resilient because we have so many sites, and we do have disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place for each facility.

What can the telecommunications industry as a whole do to help reduce energy consumption?

It is a big challenge but we are working with the European Union and the US Environmental Protection Agency to categorise IT equipment in terms of energy efficiency, in exactly the same way as white goods are categorised now.

Does BT have a formal strategy to reduce carbon emissions?

BT made a commitment to its shareholders in 1996 that it would reduce its carbon footprint by 60 per cent, and that was achieved in 2006. Now we have committed to reducing it by 80 per cent on the 1996 figure. BT alone uses more than 0.7 per cent of the UK’s entire electricity supply, and we have already reduced our overall annual bill by one per cent, equating to a £4m saving.

What is BT doing to make its datacentres more power efficient?

Not only using equipment that uses less power, but also consolidating many of our systems onto VMware and Solaris containers to physically reduce the number of servers. Rather than have 50 servers running at two per cent utilisation, we will have two servers running at 50 per cent utilisation, for example. We are also evaluating the overall power efficiency of the buildings housing our datacentres, where 50 per cent of the energy usage goes on cooling. We are looking to use fresh air cooling rather than refrigeration, and to convert AC to DC power at the rack level so we do not have to run uninterruptible power supplies and other bits and pieces.

About Steve O’Donnell

Steve O’Donnell is BT’s global head of datacentres and bridge operations.

Before joining BT, O’Donnell worked as head of IT infrastructure at Cable & Wireless and held senior management positions at Lehman Brothers and Deutsche Bank. .