Green Data Center: Why does it matter?

With the continuous growth of new data storage requirements and the steady enhancement of green environmental protection awareness, green data centers appear in the concept of enterprise construction. Newly retained data must be protected, cooled, and transferred efficiently. This means that the huge energy demands of data centers present challenges in terms of cost and sustainability, and enterprises are increasingly concerned about the energy demands of their data centers. It can be seen that sustainable and renewable energy resources have become the development trend of green data centers.

What is Green Data Center?

A green data center is an enterprise-class computing facility that is entirely built, managed, and operated on green computing principles. It provides the same features and capabilities as a typical data center but uses less energy and space, and its design and operation are environmentally friendly.

A green data center is built to have a minimal effect on the natural environment. The following are primary green data center features:

• Built from the ground up in an environment-friendly facility
• Consume minimal power resources for operation and maintenance – both for the primary computing infrastructure and supporting electronic resources, such as cooling, backup, and lighting
• Typically operate with green or renewable energy, such as solar, wind, or hydel power
• The entire infrastructure is installed with the lowest power and carbon footprint
• Minimal e-waste with recyclable or reusable equipment

Top Benefits

Next-gen Storage Experience

The BFSI sector and other industrial sectors have recorded tremendous growth in data over recent years. This rapid growth in data leads enterprises to find a sustainable and virtual data center. Such data centers are advanced and more cost-effective than traditional data centers to meet the company’s ever-increasing data requirements. Virtual data centers are capable of offering a futuristic data storage facility irrespective of business model and size.

Reduced Impact on the Environment

The green or sustainable data centers reduce energy consumption and exert less impact on the environment as compared to traditional ones. What’s more, the new equipment and newer techniques to save energy can be implemented in sustainable data centers with ease. This implementation contributes a lot to reducing carbon footprints and adverse effects on our environment.

Consumed Less Energy

The virtual data center has increased efficiency in energy consumption. Virtualization enables the IT staff to monitor and control the equipment from a remote location. It enables the data center management to keep the optimum temperature along with minimal lighting. Even a minor increase in the temperature can reduce the energy cost significantly, and the virtual data center enables the operators to maintain the temperature for consuming less energy.

Turning Off Unused Servers

The traditional data center allocates specific storage space on the basis of the client company’s requirements. After some time, as the need increases, the data center allocates additional space automatically. Now, this process often creates dead server space. As per the estimate, up to a fifth of all servers are idle or unused mainly due to this reason. These servers consume power and other resources though to increase capital expenditure. The green data centers can turn these servers off and reduce energy consumption and cost.

Decreased Capital Expenditure

One of the major reasons why you have to pay a lot of bucks for using data centers is the power consumption is very high at traditional data centers. Now, green or environment-friendly data centers use the minimum amount of power thanks to continuous monitoring and effective data management services. Also, such data centers can reclaim unused power to use it for different applications. In a way, these data centers consume energy very efficiently thereby reducing the capital expenditure.

What are the key elements of a Green Data Center?

If you want to go green, you have to consider different aspects like site selection, materials, life-cycle management, and more.

• Site selection: placing your data center in a location where you can get ideal performance for minimum impact.
• Materials and equipment: choosing carbon-neutral or minimally damaging materials for building the data center.
• Life-cycle management: ensure all equipment is properly recycled to not contribute to the growing e-waste problem.
• Integrated data center management (IDCM) systems: A smart IDCM uses AI-powered algorithms to optimize power usage, temperatures, climate control systems, and more.
• Energy usage and sourcing: strive to use as little power as possible from renewable energy sources.
• Water conservation: sourcing and handling water with the environment in mind.

Green data centers naturally have lower energy consumption because of smart site selection, but that’s only the starting point. Every working element that goes into the data center — from the smallest piece of hardware to the concrete used in its walls — is carefully chosen to minimize environmental impact. Green design and smart solutions improve energy efficiency and help reduce the carbon footprint.

5 ways to Create a Green Data Center

After talking about the benefits of a green data center, then how to build a green data center. Here are a series of green data center solutions.

• Virtualization extension: Enterprises can build a virtualized computer system with the help of virtualization technology, and run multiple applications and operating systems through fewer servers, thereby realizing the construction of green data centers.
• Renewable energy utilization: Enterprises can opt for solar panels, wind turbines, or hydroelectric plants that can generate energy to power backup generators without any harm to the environment.
• Enter eco mode: Setting the alternating current UPS to eco mode is one way to go green. This setup can significantly improve data center efficiency and reduce PUE. Alternatively, enterprises can reuse equipment, which not only saves money but also eliminates unnecessary emissions from seeping into the atmosphere.
• Optimized cooling: Data center infrastructure managers can introduce simple and implementable cooling solutions, such as deploying hot aisle/cold aisle configurations. Data centers can further accelerate cooling output by investing in air handlers and coolers and installing economizers that draw outside air from the natural environment to build green data center cooling systems.
• DCIM and BMS systems: DCIM software and BMS software can help data center managers identify and document ways to use more efficient energy, helping data centers become more efficient and achieve sustainability goals.

Conclusion

Data center sustainability means reducing energy/water consumption and carbon emissions to offset increased computing and mobile device usage to keep businesses running smoothly. The development of green data centers has become an imperative development trend, and it also caters to the green goals of global environmental protection. As a beneficiary, enterprises can not only save operating costs but also effectively reduce energy consumption. This is also an important reason for the construction of green data centers.