Aligned Energy

Making data center billing more flexible and transparent with AVEVA™ PI System™

As a data center co-location provider, Aligned Energy offers data resources to a broad range of clients. Customers using their data centers vary in size from single retail enterprises, who only need one rack or server, to hyper-scale customers who may need several racks and up to 8-megawatts of capacity. This wide range of capacity demands makes for a complicated power usage monitoring and billing situation. Aligned Energy has long used the PI System for traditional applications such as monitoring the power distribution and cooling in their data centers. But when they began looking for a way to make their power usage monitoring and billing systems more transparent and tailored to their customers’ varied needs, they turned to Energy Metrics, a former subsidiary of Aligned Energy, for help. Energy Metrics devised a strategy to help Aligned Energy reach their transparency and flexibility goals by using Aligned Energy’s existing PI System data in new ways.

Having a wide range of customers means that Aligned Energy has to be flexible enough to deal with constantly changing load demands. Not only do daily load demands vary significantly from client to  client, load densities for a particular rack or pod can evolve over time. “Customers will start with one generation of equipment and use 7kw per rack. But over a period of three to five years, they replace the servers, and the servers are suddenly 22kw,” explained Rajendran Avadaiappan, former CIO of Aligned Energy and current CEO of Energy Metrics, during his presentation at PI World 2018 in San Francisco. “As densities change and loads change, the cooling and power requirements change. We need to be able to flexibly change those parameters.”

Challenges

• Leverage more value from available real-time data to create greater flexibility and visibility regarding customer energy usage and billing

Solutions 

• AVEVA™ PI System

Results

• Customers are able to monitor their own energy usage and unused capacity.

“Personally what I love about AF is how it enables us to model these complex data structures.”

Gregor Vilkner - VP of Products, Energy Metrics