Can data centers reduce carbon cost by trading availability for sustainability?

The information and communications technology sector is responsible for 2% of global carbon emissions – and experiencing unprecedented growth. As the need to create, capture, and consume data continues to grow, data center customers also are becoming more demanding in their expectations. Consumers have come to expect, and therefore demand, total availability and real-time access to all their data, all the time.

This expectation is perhaps becoming the leading driver of environmental impact from data centers.

The insatiable appetite and expectation of consumers for continuous, 100% availability for all services drives applications, databases, and ultimately data centers to expand and strengthen to provide replication and redundancies – which drives a cycle of overprovisioning, thus allowing overconsumption.

Enterprise computing clients support either consumers or their business missions, and their demands for availability are similar. This sector is seeking ways to reduce its carbon footprint and has begun to influence the data center industry to maintain a high degree of availably when required – while designing facilities that use energy sources more efficiently (lower PUE) and adopt alternate sources of power.

Ultimately this is the path to sustainability as the prospect of lowering availability demands will be difficult.

Finding the right balance between consumer demand and future data center design

When designing data center facilities we can – and do – build facilities with 100% uptime guaranteed.

Is this necessary? Do data centers still need redundant components like backup power generators? How can we change customer perspectives?

The present state of data center design has coalesced around a high level of redundancy and has not yet embraced lowering that standard. The market, however, can influence users by offering lower-cost alternative designs with better efficiency to support applications that can sustain less robust infrastructure. The challenge is balancing the reduced capital cost for reducing infrastructure with the adoption of potentially more costly alternate energy sources.

As consultants, we can help drive a new way of thinking about how we approach technology – changing end users’ perceptions and willingness to accept less than 100% availability or less than immediate access to all data. This could allow the industry to reduce its carbon footprint by changing design parameters beyond looking solely at sustainability. Modifications to reduce unnecessary carbon impacts are a known consideration in today’s designs. Further enhancements can be introduced as consumer availability requirements adjust.

Shifting societal expectations of the information and communications technology industry would have a significant influence on the long-term costs of designing even greener data center facilities.

This will take time.

Educating consumers may shift perceptions

To design facilities that can – yet don’t need – to fulfill consumer demand for 100% availability will require consumer education and adapting how availability is understood.

Today, consumers want video streaming without disruption and demand real-time access to every digital photo ever taken. As a society, this insatiable appetite for data only continues to grow, leading to increasingly more consumption. But is this level of real-time availability truly necessary?

Over the last two decades data center facilities have been designed and built with generator capacity for backup. High levels of redundant infrastructure are ready when called upon – but many facilities operate for 10+ years without ever needing them. Yet, data center owners today hesitate to build a facility without generators because of the competitive edge it provides.

We could shift customer perception and requirements for some services (e.g., pictures but not banking apps) over time through consumer education, so future designs would consider today’s unthinkable.

Is some downtime acceptable to protect the environment?

Offering an alternative: moving unneeded data offline

Data centers need to be economically feasible, green, and socially responsible: this is the triple bottom line. High levels of redundancy in data center architecture, therefore, may not make sense.

To help change perceptions, we need to better partner with technology to understand what the future looks like if we continue down this path. Moving aged photos to offline storage, and moving unused data to an offline space for future recovery, are considerations to explore.

Summary

The onus is on not only on data center owners, consultants, and designers, but should now involve consumer expectations. By changing end user requirements and exposing the economic and environmental consequences of those requirements, the data center industry could modify its characteristics to continue increasing efficiency, while reducing or eliminating those design parameters that have negative effects on our planet.

About the author

Denis is a leader in designing and managing highly available and environmentally sustainable data centers. He specializes in optimizing the capabilities of existing facilities, as well as designing and delivering many green- and brownfield critical facilities across the globe. Over the past two decades Denis has managed the global data center portfolio for The Walt Disney Company and Verizon. He combines strict design principles, operating standards, and extensive personnel training to ensure uninterrupted availability, along with personnel safety, while improving the energy efficiency profile of each facility.

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Can data centers reduce carbon cost by trading availability for sustainability?

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