THE EDGE
hen a person streams videos
from their smart phone or
uploads their holiday photos
to Facebook, it is unlikely they
will ever think about how much energy
they are consuming, or the impact they
are having on the environment.
W
However, as more and more people
become data-hungry ‘smart phone’
addicts hooked on social media,
hyperconnected companies become ever
more big-data-hungry to feed our habits.
Consequently, we’re all consuming more
energy – and the pressure we are putting
on the planet is growing.
In fact, a report from Climate Change
News predicts that billions of Internet-
connected devices could produce 3.5% of
global emissions within 10 years and that
the communications industry could use
20% of all the world’s electricity by 2025.
These immense figures may have people
asking how their social media usage can
have such a detrimental impact on the
environment. Well, it comes down to the
data centres used by today’s tech giants.
While the data centres themselves may
not be leaking out black smoke and
polluting the air, they are using huge
amounts of electricity to feed the Internet
population’s desire for data.
To put this into perspective, according
to data from statistics portal Statista,
the energy consumption of Facebook
amounted to about 2.46 terawatt hours
in 2017, compared to 532 gigawatt hours
in 2011.
This is a gigantic leap and you can bet
that with Facebook reportedly having 2.3
billion monthly users today it is only going
to increase.
However, Facebook is far from being
the only culprit of huge energy
consumption. Data centre energy
consumption across the entire United
States is extremely high.
Systems design expert and entrepreneur
Dr. Radoslav Danilak says that US data
centres today use more than 90 billion
kilowatt-hours of electricity a year,
requiring roughly the energy-output
equivalent of 34 giant (500-megawatt)
coal-powered plants.
Globally, data centres consumed
about 416 terawatts last year – that’s
approximately 3% of the world’s total
electricity output and almost 40% more
than the entire United Kingdom. Dr.
Danilak projects this rate of consumption
will double every four years and notes
the longer we put off dealing with
this massive, perilous level of energy
consumption, the harder it will become
to address.
Danny Waite, CTO of Furnace Ignite
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
This of course begs the question, what
can be done to reduce the energy
consumption of data centres without
impacting Internet-users’ desire for data?
SERVERLESS
IS ONE OF
TODAY’S NEWEST
COMPUTE
TECHNOLOGY
OFFERINGS
AND HAS
SIGNIFICANTLY
GROWN IN
POPULARITY
OVER THE LAST
FEW YEARS.
Serverless – reducing
energy consumption without
impacting performance
Serverless is one of today’s newest
compute technology offerings and has
significantly grown in popularity over the
last few years. Serverless essentially means
servers and infrastructure are managed
by a third-party cloud vendor, such as
Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Service
or Google Cloud Platform, which means
developers and IT teams do not have to
worry about running servers on premise.
By the very nature of its design, serverless
squeezes greater efficiency from servers
already in use rather than building new
ones. It allows organisations to access
backend services on a pay-per-use model,
which means they only pay for what they
use. They don’t need to buy space based
on estimates of how much they expect
to use and end up wasting money every
month. Instead, what they pay for is based
entirely on consumption.
Issue 04
69