Intelligent Data Centres Issue 06 | Page 30

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 30 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