Green Data Centers: Enhancing Digital Transformation by Conserving Environment

The ongoing digital transformation across all industries is an efficient leap towards embracing automation and reducing production costs. Digitizing operations can gain maximum business growth in less time. Data centers are a crucial part and the digital infrastructure is dependent on them. But they have been blamed for consuming a large amount of energy and giving out carbon emissions. In the Seagate hosted video that announces IDC's whitepaper 'Data Age 2025', Dave Reinsel, Senior Vice President, IDC says that the global datasphere will grow from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 zettabytes by 2025. He says, "If one was able to store the 175 zettabytes onto blu-ray discs, then you would have a stack of discs that could get you to the moon 23 times."

It is imperative for businesses to adopt sustainable practices considering climate change, rising sea levels, and increasing carbon emissions in the environment. The power usage by data centers is significantly high and they emit a humongous amount of heat. An International Energy Agency report states that data centers account for about 1% of global electricity demand. Since data centers house a humongous amount of computing systems and storage devices, they use a lot of water to cool off the heat. Thus, it is crucial to develop sustainable data centers to preserve renewable energy along with digitizing business operations.

Steps Towards A Sustainable Data Center

• Heat recovery solutions that convert waste heat generated by energy consumption into reusable energy. This waste heat can be used to meet the heat demand of nearby spaces and buildings. The waste heat generated can heat the water used in data centers in the same or different buildings. This mechanism stops the amount of heat from entering the environment and disturbing the balance. The temperature of waste heat can be increased or decreased using heat pumps to meet the needs. According to a ZDNet report, Facebook runs a two-building, 50,000 square-meter data center in Odense, Denmark, and the tech company teamed up with local district heating company Fjernvarme Fyn to redistribute the heat generated by the facility's servers straight to the nearby community's radiators.
• Liquid cooling strategies are important for data centers to maintain efficiency and limit resource exploitation. Data centers have been using air cooling methods traditionally and this has huge energy consumption levels. Liquid cooling can help in a rapid reduction of heat in data centers and lowers power consumption. Liquids have a better heat capacity and thus efficiently removes heat from data centers. Water has a better heat absorption rate than air and it allows targeted cooling methods.
• Low power servers and server virtualization helps reduce the power consumption of data centers. Technologies like smartphone computing and edge computing are more sustainable and efficient in energy consumption. Managing and using renewable energy systems powered by wind, hydro, solar, geothermal, etc., can aid in the development of greener data centers. An article by Rich Miller in Data Center Frontier states that Google continues to be one of the largest corporate purchasers of green energy, as well as a pioneer in saving energy through data center efficiency.

Google in one of its blogs speaks about its carbon-intelligent computing platform which is an efficient step towards attaining sustainability.