EDITOR’S QUESTION
the green taxes spotlight
will fall increasingly on the
highest energy consumers.
And, given the amount of energy
used by today’s data centres, it’s
hard to imagine that our industry
will escape an increased focus on its
power usage and management.
DR STU REDSHAW,
FOUNDER AND CTO,
EKKOSENSE
019 has seen a renewed
focus on climate issues,
with Extinction Rebellion
protests in London
successfully disrupting
the capital and Theresa
May committing the UK to becoming the
first G7 nation to make zero net emissions
a legislated goal.
2
Climate is now dominating the social,
political and corporate agenda, and
demanding long-term commitments are
being made. Government figures suggest
that total UK decarbonisation will require
an investment equivalent to 1-2% of GDP
through 2050 and some estimate the
total cost for the UK to exceed a trillion
pounds overall.
Clearly someone’s going to have to foot
this bill and there’s every likelihood that
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Issue 06
Unfortunately, the timing couldn’t be
much worse. The combination of 2018’s
exceptionally hot summer, uncertain
data centre capacity levels due to the
continued shift towards public cloud
services and the move towards less
efficient edge centres has made efficient
operation much harder to achieve.
Indeed, according to global data centre
authority the Uptime Institute, average
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)
numbers have actually gone up recently,
with a rise from 1.58 in 2018 to 1.67 over
the last 12 months.
While increased demands on data centre
services are a factor behind this, it’s also
true that many data centre operators have
simply hidden behind their critical facilities
status to avoid serious scrutiny of their
energy usage.
And, although it’s understandable that
DC teams should prioritise risk avoidance
for their critical services, the standard
practice of simply adding more and more
expensive cooling hardware to handle
escalating capacity demands is storing up
a serious carbon issue for organisations
trying to move to net zero.
As a result, data centres aren’t doing
enough to optimise energy performance.
The reality for data centre operators is that
they now need to move beyond incremental
improvements to achieve this goal.
Some of the smarter data centre teams
are already using the latest software-
driven thermal optimisation techniques
to secure an average 25-30% data centre
energy saving and they’re also successfully
removing 100% of thermal risk from their
facilities. Because of this, the best practice
bar is shifting. Traditionally-managed data
centres are going to find it harder and
harder to persuade their CIOs and CFOs to
support further capital expenditure when
they ask for the next round of data centre
cooling hardware.
The good news though is that for the
vast majority of operational DCs, straight
forward options are available to address
these issues.
For example, with the latest release of our
cloud-based 3D data centre monitoring,
management and optimisation software,
we have added a unique integrated
Cooling Adviser capability that offers
clear recommendations of actions that
operations teams can take immediately
to adapt their data centre’s operational
performance and minimise the
environmental impact.
These recommendations alone can unlock
data centre cooling carbon reductions of
at least 10% without the requirement for
radical redesigns or expensive cooling
refresh programmes. It’s this kind of
accessible, practical ‘expertise as a
service’ that can make a real difference
for data centre operators – giving them a
head start on energy reduction before the
carbon reduction team starts knocking on
the door.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com