October 2009 

How does City Development & Green IT complement each other?

The unique opportunity to create and deliver the ICT Master Plan for Greater Springfield includes the requirement to merge city development and energy efficient information technology (IT) demands.

While many organisations look solely at the choice of IT product and system, such as a server or desktop computer, and how efficient they are, or how much power they consume, we consider the overall impact on the building on a 24 hour basis.

One simple method of reducing energy consumption by computers is to turn them off when not in use - particularly over night and during weekends. This method might be acceptable for desktops and laptop computers, but it is not viable for servers that run the email system, and corporate applications that might be accessed after hours.

It is these ‘high availability' email and application servers that run 24x7 that can lead to a buildings core electrical and cooling systems to also run 24x7. This is very inefficient, and means the true energy consumption is much higher than what the servers use.

At Springfield, office buildings are designed and built for people, and dedicated data centres are designed and built for high availability computers.

Through large-scale, purpose-built data centres such as the Polaris Data Centre, significant levels of power and cooling efficiencies can be delivered for high availability IT systems.

This allows high green-star office buildings such as Springfield Tower to be constructed with the ability to be ‘turned off' each night and weekend.

The same philosophy is being applied to commercial, education and health buildings being planned for Parkside, Technology Park, Education City and Health City, which will see development in Greater Springfield deliver a Green IT city.

Mike Andrea
CIO, Springfield Land Corporation