INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE
Why legacy modernisation is essential to reduce energy costs
As the demand for digital infrastructure continues to increase , newbuild data centres and a large estate of legacy IT facilities will be vital in underpinning this demand . Andy Connor , EMEA Channel Director , Subzero
Engineering , discusses how we can best meet today ’ s sustainability challenges , alongside the imperative of reducing energy costs .
In an ideal world , it would be nice to imagine that any data centre over a certain age would be quietly taken offline and retired – many being inefficient and ill-equipped to deal with today ’ s increasingly high-density IT demands . However , in the same way that the switch to electric vehicles allows for a long transition period away from fossil fuel-powered transport , to cushion the impact and the cost of such change , the reality of the digital infrastructure sector is that legacy data centres will be required for the foreseeable future .
All such facilities are capable of being replaced in a highly ambitious five-to-10- year period , but the investment required would be prohibitive . Closing older data centres without replacing them would mean a massive drop in digital infrastructure capacity , at a time when the demand has never been so high .
Establishing the exact global data centre population is not easy . In terms of what might be described as the number of data centres owned and / or operated by professional data centre providers , the US International Trade Commission estimates , as of May 2021 , a total of some 8,000 data centres globally .
However , when considering the hundreds of thousands of enterprise-owned data centres globally – everything from a cupboard with a few servers , right up to large-scale buildings – then the extent of the legacy problem is truly revealed . Let ’ s not forget that for every greenfield data centre , there ’ s at least one older facility upon which one may rely .
Why does all of this matter ?
Today , data centre PUEs have come down from an average of 2.5 in 2007 to 1.55 in 2022 , but this current figure is still a long way from the ambition of 1.0 . If the average is 1.55 , that means that there ’ s a substantial number of data centres that are not even close to that figure as of now , the impact of which comes at a significant financial and environmental cost .
Energy costs for the industry have risen massively since January 2021 . While the rate of the increase varies from region to region , many countries have witnessed a more than doubling of the cost of electricity . The silver lining to this energy crisis might be the accelerated development of renewable resources for longer-term cost and environmental benefits – the reality is that the price of power has become unsustainable .
In the data centre sector , where much of the cost of running a facility is the power bill , the impact has been significant . www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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