No-one goes out of their way to run an unsustainable datacentre, much less a positively environmentally damaging one.
But tech leaders, and the organisations they work for, have many immediate, day-to-day challenges to confront. These include working on digital transformation, ensuring they are developing an AI strategy, and simply matching capacity, and cost, to their short term needs.
Against all this, achieving “sustainability” can seem a rather abstract goal. Something to endorse in theory, but tricky to implement in reality. But with regulators and policy makers paying close attention to energy consumption by datacentres, things may be about to get much more real.
It’s already clear from current statistics that the amount of energy consumed by datacentres is rising at a dizzying rate. Worldwide electricity consumption is growing at its fastest pace in decades according to the International Energy Agency, with datacentres a clear contributor to this. The European Union’s current estimate is that datacentres account for 3 percent of electricity demand in the bloc, and this share will increase “significantly”.
But the situation could actually be worse than that. The IEA says that there is a lack of reliable data in many regions. From this September, operators of facilities in the EU rated at 500kW or more will be obliged to report their energy performance and water footprint. Informed observers believe this will (once the numbers are in and analysed) show that energy consumption is outstripping previous estimates.
If datacentre operators and tech leaders are not already thinking how they can operate more sustainably, public pressure and government policy will force them to think so.
Real world action
It’s easy to think about “sustainability” in abstract terms. But a datacentre is, afterall, a piece of critical infrastructure and making it sustainable is, at its heart, an engineering challenge. So, what factors do we need to take into account when designing a sustainable datacentre?
Simply deciding between going on-prem, cloud or hybrid can have profound implications. On-prem might give an organisation ultimate control over its infrastructure, physically as well as in terms of data sovereignty. But where is the energy coming from? In Europe, at least, a Northerly location can mean better access to sustainable energy as well as less demand for power hungry cooling.
Opting for cloud or hybrid architectures can give organisations access to the cutting edge technology designed by specialist datacentre operators and hyperscale providers, both in terms of infrastructure and power management and in terms of the applications and services they provide. And cloud and colocation providers have been racing to secure green energy supplies.
Drilling down further, architectural choices can have a dramatic effect. The three tier architecture of servers, storage and network equipment has been the standard for decades, but it’s increasingly clear that it presents some specific challenges when it comes to power consumption, not least the energy demands of separate storage and storage switch layers.
By combining the server and storage layers, hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), delivers a dramatic cut in energy consumption, and in turn reduces cooling and facilities consumption. And it can deliver further benefits through software optimisation.
This makes for a complex equation for tech leaders looking to implement high performance, highly sustainable datacentre infrastructure. So, how can we reach a conclusion?
We asked specialist advisory firm Atlantic Ventures to model the effect of all these factors, taking a model mid-sized company.
The results were startling. Switching from a modern three tier setup to deliver an efficiency potential of 27 percent the model showed. But it also showed the additional benefits companies can reap from implementing HCI in a modern colocation site, and in the public cloud. These were an additional 13 percent efficiency benefit from colocation, and a further 27.96 percent from implementing HCI in the public cloud.
Scaled up across Europe, switching to HCI could have a dramatic effect, the model showed, saving 91.7TWh of electricity between 2024 and 2030 and, crucially, 18.7 million tons of CO2 emissions.
This has clear implications for a business’ bottom line – as well as its sustainability policy – though these will vary by geography, for all the reasons listed above. This would save €25.1bn across the EU from 2024 to 2030. In the UK, where energy prices are relatively high, switching to a HCI-based architecture could save as much as €3.3bn between 2024 and 2030.
It’s fair to say these figures make the switch to a more sustainable datacentre architecture seem far less abstract.
And this can only be a good thing. Because when it comes to transforming our datacentres, the stakes are higher than ever.
Companies need to reconsider their infrastructure, if only to deliver the performance needed to support AI and other demanding applications. On top of that it’s clear that sustainability is no longer a nice to have. It will be demanded by regulators and governments, and increasingly, by users.
But with Atlantic Ventures’ work, and the EU’s tighter reporting standards, tech leaders now have information that can inform positive action towards more sustainable choices.
And, let’s face it, it makes far more sense for tech leaders to build out their own sustainable datacentre strategy than to have one imposed from outside.
About the Author
Rowen Grierson is Senior Director and General Manager at Nutanix. Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software, offering organizations a single platform for running apps and data across clouds. With Nutanix, companies can reduce complexity and simplify operations, freeing them to focus on their business outcomes. Building on its legacy as the pioneer of hyperconverged infrastructure, Nutanix is trusted by companies worldwide to power hybrid multicloud environments consistently, simply, and cost-effectively.
Featured image: Adobe Stock
