Data centres are the new polluters

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(Image: Stockfresh)

27 August 2014

US data centres are using more electricity than they need. It takes 34 power plants, each capable of generating 500 megawatts of electricity, to power all of the data centres in operation currently. By 2020, the US will need another 17 similarly sized power plants to meet projected data centre energy demands as economic activity becomes increasingly digital.

Any increase in the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity will result in an increase in carbon emissions. But added pollution is not an inevitability, according to a new report on data centre energy efficiency from the National Resources Defence Council (NRDC), an environmental action organisation.

Across the US, data centres in total used 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electrical energy in 2013, and they will be using 139 billion kilowatt-hours by 2020 — a 53% increase.

Efficiency dividend
The report argues that an improvement in energy efficiency practices by data centres could cut energy waste by at least 40%. The problems hindering efficiency include “comatose” servers, also known as ghost servers, which use power but do not run any workloads; overprovisioned IT resources; lack of virtualisation; and procurement models that don’t address energy efficiency. The typical computer server operates at no more than 12% to 18% of capacity, and as many as 30% of servers are comatose, the report states.

The paper tallies up the consequences of inattention to data centre energy efficiency on a national scale. It was assembled and reviewed with help from several organisations, including Microsoft, Google, Dell, Intel, The Green Grid, Uptime Institute and Facebook, all of which made “technical and substantial contributions.”

The NRDC makes a sharp distinction between large data centres run by large cloud providers, which account for about 5% of all data centre energy usage, and smaller, less-efficient facilities. Throughout the industry, there are “numerous shining examples of ultra-efficient data centres,” the study notes. These are not the problem. It is the thousands of other mainstream business and government data centres, and small, corporate or multi-tenant operations, that are the problem, the paper argues.

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