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Creating a Green Data Center to Help Reduce Energy Costs and Gain a Competitive Advantage

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Your guide to boosting your datacentre's environmental friendliness

Industry estimates suggest the datacentre sector is responsible for consuming anywhere between three and five percent of the world’s global energy, putting it on a similar footing – from a power usage perspective – with the aviation market.

As the demand for online services and cloud-based infrastructure and applications continues to grow, the number of datacentres needed to host them will rise accordingly, along with the amount of energy needed to keep them going.

The datacentre sector’s growing energy usage has not gone unnoticed by regulators and environmental lobbyists, prompting operators to rethink how they build, power and manage their facilities with a keen focus on sustainability.

This has prompted some organisations to embrace cutting edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence (to address areas that contribute towards increased energy use) or experiment with building facilities underwater, for example.

In this e-guide, we take a closer look at how the datacentre sector is taking steps to boost its environmental friendliness, and why. 

These are also closely related to: "Creating a Green Data Center to Help Reduce Energy Costs and Gain a Competitive Advantage"

  • Powering down: Keeping datacentre energy costs in check

    Energy costs are consistently the biggest outgoing for every datacentre operator, regardless of how big or small they are.

    And it is for precisely this reason that so many of them are fixated on finding ways to improve the energy efficiency of their facilities and, in turn, trim their power costs.

    This has seen the likes of Google, for example, push the envelope in terms of how they design and manage their facilities, with machine learning increasingly playing a role in how it manages the consumption habits of its datacentres.

    The datacentre sector’s collective energy use is also regularly coming in for scrutiny from environmental lobbyists, campaign groups and regulators too. So, from a corporate responsibility perspective, power consumption is an area no operator can afford to ignore.

    In this e-guide, we take a look at some of the outside influences that could potentially impact on datacentre power and management costs in the years to come, while also taking a closer look at some of the latest thinking and best practices around datacentre energy efficiency and cooling today.

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