The world is facing a pressing need to lower carbon consumption and reduce CO2 emissions. Companies need to adapt to difficult conditions related to both climate change and labour shortages. These days, sustainability is not just a trend or another important issue to consider, but an obligation. The environmental aspect is considered one of the key factors of liable, Green Data Center.
Green cloud computing – are sustainable data centers possible?
Cloud services are green by design, as they reduce paper consumption, speed up communication, enable remote working, etc. Thanks to their computing capabilities, many innovative IT solutions that aim to reduce the negative impact of numerous factors on the environment are developing rapidly. Ultimately, they help entrepreneurs in various industries achieve sustainability goals. However, the infrastructure on which this technology is based consumes enormous amounts of electricity. Is it really environmentally friendly?
Currently, the most critical issue in the development of cloud technologies is reducing the carbon and energy footprint, as well as lowering the amount of produced waste. If these solutions truly benefit the environment, they must have as negligible impact on it as possible.
Most importantly, data centers should be based on large, energy-efficient drives with low data replication overhead. On top of that, all hardware components used should be made to meet energy efficiency criteria and optimize power consumption. Above all, they should be durable and have a long service life, so that they can be used for as long as possible without producing electro-waste.
How can data centers be more sustainable?
Primarily, responsible data centers and cloud service providers should:
- recognize and voluntarily adopt the Best Practices EU Code of Conduct on Data Center Energy Efficiency;
- provide up-to-date information on energy efficiency and environmental policies of DC colocation partners;
- provide a guarantee of energy origin from sustainable sources covering the energy consumption of IT infrastructure;
- include environmentally friendly solutions, such as helium-filled disks, ArcticFlow Thermal Zone Cooling technology, block-level selective compression storage system for compressed data sets, and component reuse.
How to sustainably use cloud tech?
Companies wishing to work with conscious cloud service providers should choose reliable entities implementing solutions described above. After all, using the support of an external company is convenient, more accessible, cheaper, and greener. Trying to set up the whole infrastructure will consume a massive budget and may also involve unnecessary mistakes that will take a toll on the environment as well as the sustainability of the entire company.
Some of the most innovative solutions on the market are offered by CloudFerro, which offers various cloud services, related to such issues as data storage for Earth Observation. The average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) measurement for all collocations was 1.469 in Q2 of 2020. Most of the selected collocations are powered by 100% green energy.
