Data centers playkey role in reducingGHG emissions

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It turns out that data centers might be clean, but they’re certainly not green. With endless rows of electricity-guzzling servers and associated storage, network and uninterruptible power supply systems, and massive HVAC units running 24x7 to keep everything from overheating, data centers use tremendous amounts of electricity.

The number one source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is transportation (cars, trucks, ships, trains, planes), at 28.5 percent, followed closely by electricity production, at 28.4 percent. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says 68 percent of U.S. electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, mostly coal and natural gas.

So, where do data centers fit into the total consumption of electricity? The U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) reports that data centers in the United States use 70 billion kW hours (kWh) of electricity per year, which is 1.8 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. At an average cost of 10 cents per kWh, that comes to a total of $7 billion a year in energy costs.

Worldwide, it is estimated that data centers consume about 3 percent of the global electric supply and account for about 2 percent of total GHG emissions. That’s about the same as the entire airline industry. Producing electricity consumed by data centers will result in the release of 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2020, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

And it’s only getting worse. An estimated 21 billion connected internet-of-things (IoT) sensors and endpoints will exist by 2020. By 2025, IDC estimates, 152,000 new devices will be connecting to the internet every minute, bringing the total number of connected devices to 80 billion worldwide.

The back-end computational resources required to process the massive amount of information coming from industrial IoT devices, connected home devices, consumer devices and autonomous vehicles is staggering.

Cloud storage space globally is expected to double this year alone. And global data traffic is doubling every 4 years. On top of that, companies are looking to do more with the data that is already being collected, such as applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to large data sets.

In other words, electricity consumed by computing isn’t going to level off any time soon. In fact, the Berkeley Lab report says that data centers are on track to use 73 billion kW hours of electricity by 2020.

When people think about the most prevalent sources of greenhouse gas emissions, the first things that spring to mind are foul-smelling diesel trucks and industrial-era smokestacks spewing dark clouds of pollution. But what about data centers — those bright, modern buildings that form the backbone of today’s digital world?

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Pressure on companies is mounting

Enterprises are coming under intense pressure to reduce their carbon footprint, both to save money and for social, political and regulatory reasons. That means they need to find ways to reduce data center energy usage.

The UK has some of the most stringent reporting requirements in the world when it comes to GHG emissions. According to regulations that went into effect in 2013, public companies must report their GHG emissions in their annual reports to shareholders.

And the UK certainly isn’t alone. From Australia to the state of California, regulators are requiring companies to compile and release information on GHG emissions from data centers and other sources.

That means companies need to figure out how to measure their total carbon emissions. But measuring and reporting are just the beginning of the journey. Companies also should create an internal strategy for reducing GHG emissions, act on that strategy and report their progress in their annual reports. In fact, most companies today have made sustainability and environmental responsibility a core part of their mission and are voluntarily presenting a separate sustainability report that accompanies their annual report.

For example, Stagecoach Group, an international transport operation, reported it has a goal of reducing group carbon emissions from its buildings by 7.4 percent by April 2019. Specifically, it reported a reduction in purchased electricity from the equivalent of 345,544 tons of CO2 emissions in 2016 – 2017 to 118,506 tons in 2017 – 2018. In addition, Stagecoach Group reported a decrease in the use of refrigerants in its facilities from the equivalent of 20,467 tons of CO2 emissions to 16,348 tons.

National Australia Bank put it this way in its annual report: “Building energy related GHG emissions are the main contributor to the GHG emissions generated across our businesses. Our data centers are a large generator of building energy related GHG emissions.” The bank has deployed a series of energy efficiency programs in its data centers, which has contributed to its efforts to reduce GHG emissions.

Of course, one way to address the issue of GHG generated from the purchase of electricity is to simply stop buying it from sources that burn fossil fuels. British Telecom (BT) says it will buy all of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, where markets allow. BT says it is already acquiring 82 percent of its electricity in the United Kingdom, and 81 percent worldwide, from renewable sources. In its annual report, the company said it reduced total worldwide CO2 emissions by 8.9 percent.

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How to reduce GHG in data centers

Companies looking to reduce GHG emissions can make a variety of incremental improvements to existing data centers. For example, they can reduce the number of servers they use by consolidating underutilized servers and moving to server virtualization, which allows multiple applications to share the processing power of the underlying hardware. By some estimates, 30 percent of corporate servers are “zombies” that do no useful work but still consume power. And most companies are running their servers at only 10 percent to 15 percent utilization. Purchasing new energy-efficient servers and other updated data center gear, like power supplies, also helps.

There are also a number of techniques for reducing data storage requirements, such as data compression, deduplication, snapshots, thin provisioning, automated provisioning and tiered storage. When it comes to purchasing new storage equipment, companies will incur an initial expense. But they will save energy and money and reduce their GHG emissions over the life of the equipment by taking advantage of the energy efficiency of lower-speed and solid-state drives.

Energy efficiencies can also be gained by optimizing airflow management through measures such as creating hot aisles and cold aisles in the data center, creating barriers between the two types of aisles and making adjustments in HVAC gear.

But to truly transform a company’s data center relative to GHG emissions, companies should look to the cloud. In a blog post entitled, “The Data Center Is Dead,” Gartner analyst David Cappuccio predicts that by 2025, 80 percent of enterprises will have shut down their traditional data center, compared with about just 10 percent today.

He says that the traditional data center will become a legacy holding area for applications that can’t be supported in the cloud. “As interconnect services, cloud providers, the internet of things (IoT), edge services and SaaS offerings continue to proliferate, the rationale to stay in a traditional data center topology will have limited advantages.”

Data center innovations

Cloud providers can be more efficient because of their scale. A typical cloud provider can achieve 65 percent server utilization rates, compared to 10 to 15 percent for on-premises enterprise servers. This means that when companies move to the cloud or to a virtual private cloud, they can provision 75 percent fewer servers to get the same amount of work done.

In addition, a typical on-premises data center is 29 percent less efficient in its energy usage than a cloud provider that uses world-class facility designs, cooling systems and workload-optimized equipment. Cloud providers also take advantage of multi-tenancy to squeeze even more efficiency out of their resources.

And the entire data center topology of cloud providers is different. Enterprise data centers have a mix of legacy equipment that typically includes a range of large, proprietary servers and storage devices. Cloud services providers typically use open source operating systems on white-box hardware made with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, or they literally build their own servers from the ground up, resulting in lower costs and higher efficiency.

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All of the major cloud service providers — Google, Amazon and Microsoft — plus other leading-edge tech companies such as Apple, claim to have either achieved carbon-neutral status or are close to doing so. They have accomplished this through a combination of: shifting to renewable sources of energy such as solar or wind, using offsets such as planting trees, and deploying the latest in eco-friendly data center construction and operations.

Examples of other efforts abound. The company Switch, which runs three of the world’s 10 biggest data centers, has announced plans to build a solar-powered hub in central Nevada. Norway’s biggest bank, DNB, runs its main data center in an underground bunker that is cooled by cold water from a nearby fjord. Facebook has a data center in Sweden for the same reason. A U.S.–Norwegian partnership is building the world’s largest data center above the Arctic Circle.

And Microsoft recently sank a containerized data center in the water off the coast of Scotland. The 40-foot-long data center has 12 racks and 864 servers. The idea is to develop self-sufficient underwater data centers that can be deployed quickly to coastal cities. These environmentally sustainable, prepackaged data center units could be ordered to size and left to operate on the seafloors for years, delivering processing power to nearby population centers.

What companies should be doing

The first step for most companies is simply trying to get a handle on current levels of emissions. Today’s best practices divide emissions into categories: The first category, or Scope 1, includes emissions created by employee use of cars or trucks, manufacturing, business travel, gas losses from cooling systems and so forth. Scope 2 covers purchased electricity. In many sustainability reports, companies also track emissions generated by their supply chain partners. And, depending on the industry, some companies try to improve the energy efficiency of their customers.

To get a handle on Scope 2 emissions, companies can set a baseline by drilling down to the server level to understand current GHG emissions attributed to data centers, and then develop a mitigation plan.

Once the data center data is captured, it needs to be converted into commonly used metrics, such as the total number of metric tons of CO2 emitted. For companies lacking the expertise to accomplish this task, there are third-party consultants with their own GHG assessment tools that will conduct an assessment and create a baseline.

Companies that have already taken some steps to save money on energy and to reduce their carbon footprint by embarking on server virtualization projects might not have measured the impact. Gathering that information and showing historical savings associated with those efforts is important.

The next step is to develop a comprehensive strategy to increase the energy efficiency of the data center. Companies should identify all of the possible opportunities and create a report tailored to their specific business. The report, which would be presented to chief information officers, chief executive officers and boards of directors, would present cost/benefit options on short-term and long-term initiatives, and incremental and transformative changes.

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One approach would be to work with an IT services company that has experience optimizing on-premises data centers, runs its own virtual private clouds, has expertise in helping companies move to the cloud and has GHG assessment tools. That IT services company would work closely with the client to help it make informed decisions on its server setup and overall data center energy usage.

The ultimate goal is to create a closed-loop system where GHG emissions from data centers are continually reduced, those reductions are measured annually, and the results are disseminated to shareholders, employees, customers, supply chain partners and the public.

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