Prioritising efficiency: data centre sustainability

In the past few years, Australia, along with most of the world, managed to weather the sudden storm of national and global lockdowns, shifts to hybrid working and rushed digital transformation, due to the scalability of data centres to support skyrocketing levels of cloudification.

Still, the capacity for data centres to support escalating demand for cloud and digital services is being affected by ongoing supply chain disruptions and acute labour shortages. Furthermore, spiking inflation and energy prices, exacerbated by the Russia–Ukraine war, have forced every level of organisation to rearrange supply chains and adjust energy costs.

The volatility has steadily driven up energy consumption costs, and managing such critical expenses is and will be a priority imperative for successful, futureproof data centre operations.

While these global shocks do not exclusively impact the data centre segment, the exponentially growing role of back-end data centre processing and storage in everyday commercial, consumer and social use has magnified the challenges of the cloud data centre landscape. So, how are data centre operators coping? Following are some strategies being pursued with environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) in mind.

• Doing more with narrower margins for error — The speed and volume of data being generated, processed and transported by cloud-reliant and cloud-based applications is growing exponentially. Downtime is costly and intolerable. Many new and critical applications require very low latencies to work well. Therefore, data centres are increasingly being moved to the edge of the network to shave those last few precious milliseconds off the response time. Also, 5G is being used to achieve low latency bandwidth for ever more advanced applications.
• Chasing greater energy efficiencies — For data centre operators, efficiency is not so much a metric for profitability as it is a metric for survival in 2023. The bottom line is that data centres must continuously look to increase the efficiency of service delivery, using leading-edge fibre and infrastructure, as well as machine learning and AI tools. At the same time, operators must increase efficiency in terms of energy use per unit of compute power.
   

When weighing energy efficiency, cost is the most obvious factor, but it is by no means the only one. Increasingly over the next few years, sustainability metrics are expected to significantly influence operations and decision-making.

In a year where global geopolitical tensions, rolling blackouts and increasing energy prices in Australia, particularly for the business sector, are uncertainties to be contended with, both regulatory and social opinions will only tilt further away from data centre developers. That is why energy efficiency takes top priority, and data centres are under pressure to:

• convert to the most efficient and accessible storage media
• use detailed analytics to identify storage, compute and power consolidation opportunities
• deploy ultra-efficient, uninterruptible power supply systems
• evaluate their facility’s thermal limits and switch to colocation to share electrical and communications overheads
• perform real-time measurements of stress on the existing electrical grid and transition to more sustainable power local to the data centre. Siting facilities near renewable energy sources is also strongly considered.
   

On a more strategic level, moving data centres to the edge, connected by high-speed fibre, can also greatly enhance energy efficiency and latency.

The world needs to embrace ESG

All of the strategies above, and countless others, demonstrate how much efficiency in our daily cloud-centric lives now depends on data centres.

While many people may never appreciate the broader social and commercial impact a data centre has on the world, it is worth remembering how fast, robust data storage and processing can improve all of the most vital and often overlooked parts of everyday living.

Image credit: iStock.com/ArtemisDiana