The huge increase in datacentre energy consumption is widely acknowledged; Forrester claims datacentres are responsible for 45% of all energy used by IT. However, with plans to build more datacentres to meet demand, it’s hard to see how the IT industry can meet the calls for it to become ‘green’ but what can definitely be achieved is a ‘greener’ approach with just simple improvements to efficiency.
So does the answer lie in building new datacentres and filling them with the newest ‘green‘ technologies? No because the deployment of new, more efficient technologies such as advanced cooling systems and better servers will not make IT ‘green’ and will have little impact on making it ‘greener’. What will work is making better use of existing datacentres before building new ones.
- Application developers need to be looking at more efficient software that uses less powerful processors while delivering the same functionality.
- Datacentre owners need to consider the frequency of IT refresh cycles. Do they really need latest, greatest probably more efficient server? They need to take into consideration the environmental impact of disposal of the old one.
- Review the test and development environment. Are there servers not being used regularly? Could they be switched off?
- Better air flow management. Even when laid out in neat rows efficient airflow is significantly hampered if cabinets are not facing the right way. Hot air vented out the rear of the first row is sucked into the intake of the next row and higher temperatures increase with each cycle of heat generation in each row. Hot and cold aisle design is more efficient where server racks are lined up in alternating rows with cold air intakes and hot air exhausts facing each other. The front of the cabinets make up the cold aisles and the rear of the cabinets make up the hot aisles. However, even once the cabinets are facing the right way with the cool air sucked through the front and hot air released from the back, cold air is still lost and cooling air is expensive and energy intensive. Total separation is now regarded as the most efficient approach to cooling. By ducting hot air into the ceiling void and venting cold air into the server room, they are kept completely separate which reduces the risk of mixing the hot air with the cold. This means a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.15 is possible, because free air cooling, which traditionally uses outside air to cool servers, can be used for longer periods.
- Filling in the gaps. Major savings can also be achieved by sealing all the holes in the computer room perimeter. Using permanently installed firestop materials for conduits, pipes and construction holes and removable fire pillows for floor or wall cable pass throughs is a first step. It’s also important to seal all raised-floor cable openings and any openings around PDUs and cooling units where cool air could escape. By doing this you can improve the static pressure and even switch off some of the CRAC/CRAH cooling units to save money.
- Most Datacentres are lit 24/7 unnecessarily. An immediate saving of 5% on the annual power bill could be achieved by simply switching off the lights.
- Consider how your energy is purchased. Wind, wave or solar power does not have to be generated on-site and can be fed into the grid elsewhere.
- Packaging – suppliers and manufacturers need to be encouraged to use less packaging, in particular fewer plastics and polymers.
- The average UK datacentre generates about 5 tonnes of waste in a year. Is this recycled? Does it go to landfill? Can servers be recycled? According to Gartner, UK companies pour 1.5m PCs, equal to 125,000 tonnes of IT equipment into landfill sites every year.
According to IDC, the amount of data being produced and replicated worldwide is doubling every two years and as power consumption increases it becomes even more important for datacentres to tackle every inefficiency. While it’s encouraging that many datacentre providers are assessing their sustainability strategy on a larger scale this does sometimes mean that the small things can be overlooked. These easy-to-implement measures could be delivering significant savings right now. Sustainable computing may be a long way off but a more efficient Data Centre operation can certainly be achieved.
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