Recognising that the environmental impact of data is growing, organisations are seeking green solutions to deal with the problem.
The desire to allow customers to have access to data added to the rise of mobile devices across the globe means many companies are struggling to deal with a rising tide of digital data, and those demands are growing.
Corporations are spending billions of dollars to ensure customer access to that data is as simple as the click of a button. But behind the scenes it is a little more complex with organisations struggling to manage mountains of historical data that is growing daily.
Digital data volumes are measured in terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes. All the information stored digitally in the world today is estimated at one zettabyte. A yottabyte is a quantity that is so huge it starts to get comical.
Trying to store so much digital information is getting out of hand, which is why scientists are looking at DNA for a solution.
Ask IT researcher IDC, and the analyst firm will say the world is awash in a rising sea of data. IDC says the amount of digital data being stored is more than doubling every 24 months and could grow 50 times by 2020.
This data explosion is threatening to overwhelm an already overloaded IT infrastructure.
In fact, data is the biggest environmental pressure being placed on the world today as the emissions from massive data centres break new global restrictions and the power consumed to run these essential services spirals upwards at a time when power production is in a radical state of change.
Sustainable data centres can lesson that impact.
For a large enterprise, data is a great asset, providing information about customers, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders.
While the value of the data outweighs the problem of managing it, there are many financial, regulatory, political and social implications to its growth.
For example, power consumption per server in a data centre was recently reported to have passed the cost of the server itself during its lifetime – typically three years.
Data centres consume 1.2 per cent of global power, and managing this asset requires energy and creates heat, and with the number of data centres being built around the world expected to double by 2016, the problem is only going to get worse.
While data centres are becoming more energy efficient, there will always be massive power consumption, accompanied by unavoidable heat and CO2 emissions affecting the environment.
Carbon pricing is being rolled out across the globe, including in Australia, as one solution to this growing problem.
Investors, customers, suppliers and the media now judge the performance, value and strategy of a company based partly on its corporate social responsibility (CSR), specifically its environmental impact and what it is doing about it.
Being “clean and green” is good for brands, good for revenue, good for financial efficiency and good for the future stature of a company.
Then there are the funds specifically dedicated to green stocks, which can be found on every stock exchange around the world.
Of course, to address the issue, you need more data. It is impossible to measure the performance and impact of any initiative without monitoring its effectiveness.
With accurate data, an organisation can find a solution. A data centre manager can, in real-time and proactively, adapt the physical infrastructure to meet the current demands on the systems.
While many organisations are introducing sustainability measures, some companies are going even further and building data centres that are entirely self-sustaining.
These new developments include building ambient data centres where outside conditions maintain lower temperatures in the data centre, solar and biofuel power generation, and trigeneration technologies where energy produced by other operational processes – such as the heat from servers – is used to power chillers that cool the water used to reduce the temperatures around racks of equipment.
For more solutions check out the 10-page data centre feature in the May edition of Climate Control News Magazine.
