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Views: 92 Author: Site Editor Publish Time: 2022-07-22 Origin: Site
The data center industry needs to clean up its act, and one way to improve efficiency is to make better use of existing data center facilities.
Climate change is the biggest global threat we face. And the amount of digital data to be processed continues to grow, so physical space is needed to store it all. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) estimates that U.S. data centers consume 1.8 percent of the electricity consumed in the United States, and that number is set to rise. While there are a growing number of carbon-neutral data centers available, only a few are able to use renewable energy.
Typically, enterprises facing increasing data challenges invest in new hardware, but the average server utilization for any given data center is very low. The average core monetary cost of this underutilization is estimated at $36 billion. Arguably, the environmental costs are much higher, with data centers reportedly emitting the same carbon footprint as the aviation industry.
The data center industry has grown exponentially over the past decade. According to IDC, there were only 500,000 data centers worldwide in 2012, compared to 8 million today. Increased technological complexity, the proliferation of sensitive data and an evolving regulatory landscape mean that data management is more difficult than ever.
The concern is that the amount of data people use and process will continue to increase. Industry experts suggest that energy used in data centers is expected to double every four years. This is unlikely to slow down.
All is not lost
A 2017 report from Greenpeace urged industry to collaborate on renewable energy to address the risks. Some data centers are implementing certain processes or technologies, such as using natural forms of air cooling. The adoption of green data center technologies has grown in popularity, but their usefulness is still limited for most businesses around the world.
Instead of operating at 5 to 15 percent utilization, data center operators should always maintain server utilization between 90 and 100 percent to effectively manage data growth, save millions of dollars, and reduce carbon impact. Solutions that focus on this efficiency are sustainable and improve performance.
Thanks largely to innovation, sustainable operations are no longer based on higher costs. Data management platforms can help optimize processing power: utilizing underutilized computing power available in existing IT infrastructure rather than encouraging the introduction of new hardware to meet business needs.
Green data centers can help with climate change to some extent, but the wait time is too long. People can't rely on that. It's time for businesses to review and better manage their growing data needs using on-premise, private or public clouds.
