Daryl Elfield, Partner, Sustainable IT at KPMG UK, reveals five actionable strategies for data centre operators to enhance sustainability and adopt greener, more eco-conscious practices.
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals have meant that sustainability has been firmly on the agenda of businesses since 2015, although for many this has been a consideration for longer. The challenge is that while businesses often have the ambition and plans in place to work towards net zero and improve their sustainability, they often face new barriers to achieving this.
These challenges have increased tenfold for data centres over the last couple of years with the rise of Generative AI and, as such, the increased demand it places on data centres and power supplies.
Data centres have a dilemma – they rely on a huge amount of power to run their operations, and with the increasing development and use of AI, the demand is only growing. In fact, the National Grid has said they expect the demand from commercial data centres to increase six-fold just in the next 10 years. How green the power sources data centres use plays a big part in the sustainability challenge for data centres.
So, what are the benefits of making data centres more sustainable?
Firstly, it’s about the bottom line. While becoming more sustainable may incur costs in the short term, in the long term it can increase efficiency and reduce operational costs.
Also, having a ‘greener’ data centre could make them more attractive to potential clients. As data centre users look at their own carbon footprints, they will be looking at those of their supply chains, such as where they are housing their data.
Following the why, what is the how? What can data centre operators do to reduce their environmental impact?
Five ways data centre operators can improve their sustainability
Energy source
Data centres have always needed a good power supply but with workloads becoming increasingly intensive, the power requirement has also grown. The challenge is needing a constant power supply that doesn’t drop out as data centres run 24/7. Some renewable options may not be able to provide a guaranteed supply of power. However, there are options data centres can look at for a more sustainable source than fossil fuels, and they could look at an energy mix. These can include renewable energy, small modular reactors, batteries and fuel cells.
Waste recycling
The excess heat dissipated in the data centres could be recycled to other energy systems for utilisation. We have seen examples of this in practice with data centres heating swimming pools and other places.
Efficiency
Historically, data centres have relied on operational efficiency metrics to reduce costs and improve sustainability. This is still an area that can impact sustainability through things such as reducing physical waste, reducing electronic waste by extending life cycles and recycling equipment.
They can also look at their own IT systems to improve efficiency and reduce unnecessary usage. For example, using software-defined memory management, or implementing software to manage central processing unit (CPU) utilisation, can significantly reduce power consumption and the need to buy new hardware.
Water efficiency is also increasingly being considered given the role of cooling systems in data centres.
Building a data centre
Location should be a key consideration when it comes to the environmental impact the data centre could have. Data centres which are built in warmer climates will have a bigger challenge on their hands than those in colder climates. That’s simply down to the impact of natural cooling – if you need to keep servers cool in a cold climate you’re helped by the colder temperatures, if you’re in a warm environment, it’s going to require more effort to keep them at the right temperature.
Choosing more sustainable materials when building new data centres can also help.
Monitoring and reporting
Data centre operators should consider how they monitor their operational efficiency and their reporting mechanisms. Data-rich insights could not only help them assess the efficiency of their power usage but also better direct investments.
Reporting their sustainability credentials and environmental impact could help attract and retain users. As companies evaluate their environmental impact as well as their supply chain’s impact, they may start looking at the sustainability practices of their cloud service providers and data centres. That’s why even if a data centre operator may not think sustainability is that important for them, it could become so if businesses are making decisions based on sustainability credentials or practices.
Of course, this isn’t an exclusive list – there will be many other areas that data centres could focus on to improve their sustainability.
Data centre users also have a part to play in this too. Companies that use the cloud to store all or parts of their data will be using data centres to house it. While they can’t control what sustainability measures data centre operators put in place themselves, they can help by reviewing their own IT systems and implementing processes to ensure unnecessary files are deleted from their cloud systems. This is important because to store the data, it requires a constant power source, and the more that is stored, the more power that is used. Ensuring they are only storing what they need should lower their digital carbon footprint.
The discussion around the environmental impact of data centres and how they could become more sustainable is one that is likely to rumble on as data centre operators, energy providers, data centre clients and governments all consider the issue.
Data centre operators who want to set themselves up well for the future will have to consider how they can embed more sustainable practices into the way they are run and built.
