The future green data center may be closer than you think. Server virtualization allows many virtual machines to run on a single physical server, reducing overall energy use while increasing efficiency and speed.
Future Green Data Center
A future green data center is a building that produces low emissions. It considers the environment so it can use less energy and water.
Green data centers lower the emission of greenhouse gases and make business more sustainable.
The green data center has become a prime concern for companies lately. For example, Cisco is building the first LEED Platinum-certified data center in Ashburn, Virginia. In addition to the state-of-the-art design, power consumption is significantly reduced through heat recovery units and chillers. This approach is similar to that taken by Google. They have also built a LEED Gold-certified data center. The two are just some of the many companies that are thinking green when it comes to their data centers.
Data centers account for a large portion of energy consumption worldwide. A study by IDC predicts that this energy consumption will double by 2017. As if that weren’t enough, 40% of this energy usage is wasted due to inefficient hardware and software used in these data centers. These factors make data centers an ideal location to implement strategies to reduce emissions while allowing efficient operation.
The green data center movement has been around for several years now. However, it has only recently gained steam with implementing new technology and standards in efficiency and sustainability.
How to prepare for this future?
A future green data center can be built with several strategies that will help reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The first step is to use sustainable products, usually made from recycled materials that would otherwise be discarded. New buildings should also use renewable energy sources such as solar panels or wind turbines which will create less carbon dioxide when they operate because they do not burn fossil fuels such as coal or petroleum products.
One of the biggest challenges that IT departments face is how to minimize their impact on the environment. Data centers consume a tremendous amount of energy, and as more and more companies turn to the cloud for their computing needs, they must scale up to meet this demand. A typical data center consumes an enormous amount of energy in the course of normal operations: it’s estimated that the electricity consumption of the entire internet could power Switzerland, which has a population of 8 million people.
Significant energy savings can be achieved by harnessing green technologies that are already available. For example, due to their lower efficiency, many data centers use water-cooled HVAC systems rather than air-cooled ones. A water-cooled system uses about 30% less energy than an air-cooled one, but it also results in a great deal of heat waste (which is why some data centers use both systems to reduce heat waste even further). In contrast, a chilled water system uses the same amount of energy but produces no excess heat waste and can achieve more significant energy savings over time.
Read also: Data Center Energy Efficiency by Optimizing Its Airflow.
A Step Forward
A future green data center adapts to changing business requirements using dynamic virtualization technology and software-defined infrastructure. This allows facilities to respond quickly to power, cooling, and network requirements changes.
Dynamic virtualization and software-defined infrastructure respond to the needs of the business by dynamically allocating resources from within the data center based on workload requirements and shifting them between servers, storage systems, and networks as needed.
Through virtualization technologies, the physical layout of a facility can be hidden from end users so that only logical resources are visible. It makes it possible for users to work with resources in an abstract manner that does not depend on the location or form of underlying physical resources.
Using this type of dynamic virtualization technology makes it possible to create multiple logical data centers where each has its own power, cooling, and network requirements that can change over time without affecting other locations in the network. Dynamic virtualization also simplifies management by allowing administrators to manage multiple locations as if they were one entity.
Why should we care about the environment?
There are many reasons why a data center should be environmentally friendly. From the local perspective, keeping our environment clean for future generations is essential. Taking advantage of natural resources such as water and electricity is crucial. In addition, there are many environmental benefits, such as carbon footprint reduction, reduced energy consumption, and air pollution. Many countries have taken steps towards Green IT. For example, in the United States, The Green Grid Forum was created to promote best practices within the industry.
The effects of global warming are real, and many devastating effects have already begun. One in eight species could become extinct from the rapid changes in temperature and weather. Humans are directly affected by droughts, flooding, fires, and severe storms.
Worth to read: Green Data Center Location Should Consider Network Latency.
Rising sea levels will flood low-lying coastal areas and cause salt water to intrude into freshwater supplies. Warmer temperatures accelerate the spread of disease vectors such as mosquitoes that carry malaria or ticks that carry Lyme disease.
Heat waves are more frequent and intense; they kill thousands of people annually in the USA alone. Heat stress makes it harder for people to work or study, particularly when they don’t have access to air conditioning. Although scientists predict that global warming will continue to worsen in severity, we can still prevent much of this damage from occurring by reducing carbon emissions now.
We should educate ourselves on the effects of global warming and then take action to minimize our contribution to it.
Conclusion
The future of data centers will be green, and it will be a technology that doesn’t require much maintenance. This could be anything from a solar farm powering the facility to an automated system that takes care of all the tasks that go into keeping a data center up and running. Sustainability is the most important thing to consider when building a green data center.
We all must pull together to help keep our planet healthy, including businesses. We can reduce the number of carbon emissions produced by data centers, make the world cleaner, and make our data centers more efficient. This article will give a few pointers on how we’ve started down this path and what you can do to help.