Romonet and resources

Romonet, a London based maker of data center management software co-founded by Zahl Limbuwala and Liam Newcombe, was declared the winner of the 2016 BusinessGreen Leaders Award in the category of "IT (Information Technology) Project of the Year.” As per details on the BusinessGreen Leaders website, there were over 100 finalists for the 24 award categories and nearly 600 guests attended the presentation ceremony on July 6, 2016 at The Brewery in London. To determine the IT Project of the Year, the organizers were on the lookout for "the perfect example of how this cutting edge industry is simultaneously striving to cut its own environmental impact and help other businesses boost their resource efficiency.”

Zahl Limbuwala (left) and Liam Newcombe: computer concerns

To tackle data centers’ water footprint, Romonet has developed Big Data Platform that "accurately models, simulates, analyzes, predicts and controls water consumption,” notes an introduction to the winning company. Water consumption is rising rapidly as businesses trade power efficiency for unsustainable water practices. Massive amount of water is pumped into cooling towers.
As explained on the website of Data Center Knowledge, "A 15-megawatt data center can use up to 360,000 gallons of water a day.” Apparently, the move to cloud computing is concentrating enormous computing power in mega-data centers containing hundreds of thousands of servers. "In many designs, all the heat from those servers is managed through cooling towers, where hot waste water from the data center is cooled, with the heat being removed through evaporation. Most of the water that remains is returned to the data center cooling system, while some is drained out of the system to remove any sediment, a process known as blowdown,” it is further elaborated.
Data centers are one of the most costly and potentially harmful business units within any large organization but now their financial and operational risks can be removed using Romonet.
"Water is one of the largest threats to international stability and data centers are voluntarily using fresh water reserves as though they are infinite. With water subsidiaries ending and public pressure mounting, organizations cannot be frivolous with how they treat our environment. Water is not merely a cost challenge, but a highly sensitive CSR (corporate social responsibility) objective. This challenge must be addressed now,” asserts Limbuwala.
Romonet is preparing to file a number of patents for its software platform, the company announced. The cloud-based platform helps companies analyze the cost of their data center assets and trace the impact of infrastructure decisions. The Romonet applications can help data center managers make informed decisions about selecting server components or predicting when a particular hard drive might fail.
As CEO of Romonet, Limbuwala is passionate about the data center and ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) industry. Starting his career as a chartered electrical engineer, he then moved into IT hardware, systems administration, network administration and eventually software development. Limbuwala is a chartered fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS) and was founder and chairman (for six years) of the BCS Data Center Specialist Group. Like Newcombe, the chief technology officer of Romonet, Limbuwala was also a consultant to the European Commission’s Joint Research Center for the development of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centers, notes his life profile.
Forty-three-year-old Limbuwala who was raised in Hertfordshire gives credit to his parents Jamshed and Persis for inculcating in him and his younger brother Savak an understanding and respect for their Zoroastrian cultural heritage whilst integrating into the British society. When pursuing his entrepreneurial dreams he had no time for his local Zoroastrian organization "but as I am old (and marginally wiser!) now I’m keen to get more directly involved and understand the importance of doing so,” says the father of 10-year-old Marcus.