Ford Greens its Data Centers

Ford is working with Tier 1 information technology suppliers to improve the energy efficiency of its data centers and reduce the carbon footprint of its corporate facilities. Data centers are significant energy consumers because of their high power consumption and cooling requirements. In the United States alone, data centers use approximately 61 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per year or 1.5 percent of total U.S. energy consumption. Without significant increases in efficiency, their demand for electricity is expected to double in the next five years.

In 2007, Ford began a three-year project that will significantly reduce the power and cooling requirements of our data centers, while improving our technology performance, data security and cost effectiveness. First, we are consolidating data centers to dramatically reduce the number of managed facilities and their total energy demand. By 2010, we will have consolidated 20 existing centers into just six, a reduction of 70 percent. We are also "virtualizing" 2,000 servers into just 100 physical servers. These consolidations will result in a 90 percent reduction in power needs and a 95 percent reduction in cooling needs. During this process we are also changing the layout of our remaining data centers to maximize their energy efficiency. By directing conditioned air into equipment racks, as opposed to cooling the entire server room, expensive chilled air is used much more efficiently and the load on building cooling equipment is reduced.

This project is already delivering significant results in energy efficiency, CO2 emissions reductions and cost savings. By December of 2007, we reduced energy use by 600,000kWh and eliminated 258,000kg of CO2. We have also developed and implemented global standards for data center design specifications so that all new and remodeled data centers will meet high energy-efficiency standards. This project is projected to yield $35 million in operational cost efficiencies within its three-year timeline. Finally, all physical waste from our data center consolidation and reconfiguration was recycled, resulting in zero contribution to landfills.