Colorado Vendor Starts Data Center Efficiency Business

RLE Technologies, a Fort Collins, Colorado-based data center leak detection and monitoring system vendor, has launched a subsidiary that will help clients improve their data center efficiency.

The company, called Future Resource Engineering, will assess the facility, make recommendations for improving energy efficiency, and help implement the improvements. It promises to provide a precise assessment of the amount of savings the improvements will provide to help the customer make the decision to improve or not to improve efficiency.

Typical recommendations are adjusting airflow management, upgrading monitoring and controls, improving operational protocols, or increasing cooling efficiency.

Future Resource Engineering will also determine whether the improvements will help the facility qualify for energy reduction incentives from the local utility.

Data center efficiency is an ongoing struggle for most of the world’s operators. Average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) among data center operators surveyed last year by the Uptime Institute was 1.7, which means the average data center is using 70 percent of the energy required to run the IT equipment to power the underlying infrastructure (electrical gear, cooling, lights, etc.). And the average PUE has not gone down substantially since 2011, remaining close to flat throughout the four years.

“For all their benefits, data centers consume an incredible amount of energy: an estimated 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in just 2013,” Jeremy Swanner, executive vice president of Future Resource Engineering, said in a statement. “Thanks to the numerous utility-approved incentive programs, there are many tangible motivations for data center owners [and] operators to make their facilities energy efficient.”