Green data center energy efficiency is important to the future of business today. Optimizing all the resources in the world is time-critical.
The continued growth in mobile phones, tablets, computers, and other IoT devices is driving up power consumption in the data center.
There are numerous strategies and resources on how to save energy in a Data Center. However, many of these strategies focus on specific areas such as cooling, power, and infrastructure.
Optimizing Green Data Center Energy
The average data center uses over 1.5 kilowatts (kW) per square foot — enough energy to power 400 homes — and the energy consumption continues to increase as companies add more servers and other equipment.
Over the past 10 years, data center capacity utilization has been steadily climbing, and most experts expect this trend to continue. Data center managers need to stay vigilant about optimizing energy efficiency and managing carbon footprints, in particular for their critical facilities with high power density requirements.
In the past decade, the amount of data in the environment surpassed 1.8 zettabytes. This means that there are more bytes of digital information than grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. Make no mistake: The digital revolution has taken hold. And it has never been more important for enterprise and government to achieve energy efficiency in their data centers.
Green data centers are more than just a trend. They’re a way to save money, help the environment and protect IT resources.
By integrating green practices into your data center operations, you can reduce the amount of energy used by servers and other equipment and give you peace of mind that your facility is being run responsibly.
Three Keys to Achieving Energy Efficiency in Your Data Center
Here are three keys to achieving energy efficiency in your data center:
1. Automation and optimization
Use automation to optimize power usage and prevent spikes in demand. Automation also allows you to monitor power usage to make sure your equipment is operating at peak efficiency.
This includes technologies such as virtualization and containers, which allow you to consolidate multiple servers onto fewer hosts. Doing so reduces power consumption by as much as 40%, according to research from Intel Corp., which also found that virtualization can increase energy efficiency by up to 80%.
Automating and optimizing a data center can make it more efficient, more secure and simpler to operate. And because these facilities are better equipped to deal with new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), they’re also less likely to become obsolete or require expensive upgrades in the future.
2. Use Energy-Efficient Hardware
In addition to being environmentally friendly, green data centers are more efficient at running applications. The use of energy-efficient hardware can help you achieve this goal.
Uptime Institute reports that server virtualization technology has helped reduce power consumption by up to 20 percent per server. Green IT expert Joel Hruska says that server virtualization also allows companies to get more out of existing infrastructure investments by reducing expenses on new hardware purchases and maintenance contracts.
Data center server energy efficiency is critical to the overall operation of a data center. Server power consumption in excess of 75% can lead to an increased CO2 emission rate and higher utility bills.
Reducing your carbon footprint is one of the most important steps that can be taken to improve server energy efficiency. The first step is to purchase energy efficient servers. You should look for servers that have an Energy Star rating or other certification from the EPA or similar organization. These will run at lower temperatures and consume less electricity than regular servers.
3. Cooling systems
Cooling systems keep servers from overheating, which can cause downtime due to hardware failure or service degradation from increased latency (lag). Without proper cooling in a data center, server performance may suffer and lead to poor customer experience for users accessing applications hosted in the cloud or on-premise. This can potentially negative consequences for business results like customer retention and revenue growth.
Natural cooling is a strategy for data centers that use outside air to cool the facility. The technology is often used in the Southwest U.S. or in facilities located near large bodies of water, which can provide an ambient temperature drop when wind blows across them.
Natural cooling systems can be more cost-effective than other cooling methods because they don’t require an air conditioner or heating system. Instead, they use evaporative cooling technology to pull heat from the air inside your data center and transfer it to water vapor in the air outside your facility.
Conclusion
A data center carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by a data center. The data centers are major consumers of energy, producing an enormous carbon footprint each year.
Data center is one the fastest growing energy consumption sectors in the world. Data center is impacting our global climate. Climate change is a problem for our generation and the future generations. We now see its effects on earth such as floods, hurricanes, droughts and other natural disasters.
By shifting electricity consumption away from peak hours, green data center energy can reduce demand on fossil fuel-powered generators and lower overall CO2 emissions. It is a common understanding that for a data center to run and operate, it does consume substantial amount of energy.
The most obvious way to reduce your carbon footprint is by changing the way you use energy. By being more efficient with data center energy consumption, we will emit less greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Data center operators should look for renewable sources of electricity whenever possible. Data center providers may include wind turbines or solar farms that generate clean power for your facility directly, or purchase “green” power from the local utility company for an additional fee (this will usually be more expensive than regular power).
Those green data center energy not just helps us power all the servers and software infrastructure related to data center, but also keeps the temperature regulated at optimal levels so that the servers, storage, and networking components continue functioning without any major hiccups. Although this is a necessary part of any data center’s business operation, we often ignore the effect such an endeavor has on Earth.
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