Asia is perhaps feeling the effects of climate change more acutely than ever, with some of the highest temperatures recorded across the region within the last few months. Amidst such extreme heat, it’s no wonder that the power-hungry data centres are once again under scrutiny for their notorious environmental impact.
The ballooning electricity bills from running data centres may be an expensive problem for their owners, but it is the environment that bears the real cost of their excessive energy consumption and carbon footprint, given data centres and data transmission networks are responsible for nearly 1% of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions.
As data centre constructions continue to grow across Apac – with 3.1 gigawatts of data centre capacity either under construction or in planning across the top six markets in the region – it is critical that these new data centres are designed with energy efficiency in mind using sustainability best practices to minimise their environmental impact.
Rightsizing is crucial to data centre sustainability and should be considered at the start of the design process because it can enable new data centres to reduce their carbon emissions by being more flexible and energy efficient. It aims to only use what we need by optimising data centres in terms of size, capacity and resources.
Rightsizing seeks to address the problems associated with the fairly common practice of “overprovisioning”, which leads enterprises to spend more on infrastructure and hardware than what they currently need in order to account for possible future scenarios that require additional capacity, such as seasonal peaks or future business growth. Overprovisioning not only adds costs, but it also leads to the inefficient use of IT equipment, as well as associated mechanical and electrical systems.
To reduce wasteful overprovisioning, organizations should conduct a comprehensive assessment to thoroughly understand current and near-future workload demands. In today’s hybrid IT world where applications and workloads are spread beyond the data centre, the benefits of rightsizing extend beyond the data centre and can improve efficiencies from the edge to the cloud.
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Yet, while many companies and data centre operators are aware of the need for rightsizing, the actual implementation of this process often leaves much to be desired, preventing companies from fully reaping the sustainability benefits that rightsizing could bring. The complexities of such a complex assessment can be overwhelming but considering rightsizing at the start of the design process is critical because it can be complicated and costly to make improvements to existing data centre infrastructure already in operation.
Key considerations when rightsizing for sustainability
To rightsize for sustainability, organisations should focus their attention on five key points.
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1. Hardware refresh and consolidation
For businesses operating a set of legacy data centres, rightsizing will start with hardware refresh and consolidation, which involves downsizing and combining underutilised servers and systems to optimise the number of physical resources being used. Because server utilisation in data centres often less than 50%, and could be as low as 20%, keeping servers running that do not generate business outcomes wastes a lot of energy.
2. Assess business requirements
Enterprises should carefully assess business requirements to determine each data centre’s actual workload and data processing needs. Additionally, businesses with existing data centres should also diagnose their current usage patterns and IT equipment and infrastructure utilisation rates to identify energy-inefficient practices to avoid in their new data centres.
3. Keep technology trends in mind
Organisations and data centre planners should factor in the likely energy demands of emerging and future technologies in order to accurately anticipate power demands and optimal cooling infrastructure. For example, staying informed and evaluating the trajectory of evolving GPU power consumption requirements enables planners to be proactive in their decision-making and allows them to build in the flexibility to scale and make informed adjustments to ensure the infrastructure can handle the emerging requirements of cutting-edge GPUs.
4. Virtualisation
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Often going hand in hand with consolidation, virtualisation has long been a best practice for data centre sustainability. Virtualisation helps reduce overprovisioning by using virtual machines (VMs) to increase utilisation rates. It involves creating virtual, software-based servers that can run on traditional physical data centre infrastructure.
Because multiple VMs can be run on a single physical server, they help maximise server usage, thus reducing floor space requirements, improving energy efficiency, and minimising the system’s carbon footprint. The flexibility and scalability that virtual data centres afford businesses also allow them to plan for future data centre needs without overprovisioning. In the same way, virtualisation is being successfully applied to networking and storage functions in order to improve efficiency and drive down electricity requirements.
5. Cooling
Given that cooling data centres to an optimal temperature is one of the most energy-intensive components of a data centre’s operations, it is essential to carefully consider cooling during rightsizing. According to a recently commissioned report on green data centre technology, 37% of the total energy consumed by Singapore data centres is used to cool IT equipment. In fact, cooling data centres efficiently is becoming even more crucial, because power density per rack increases when we implement sustainability best practices like system consolidation and installation of smaller, next-generation IT equipment that allows us to fit more into each rack.
Traditional cooling approaches such as the open-area arrangement of hot and cold aisles are not able to adequately cool this high-density infrastructure. Instead, enterprises should continue to invest in higher-efficiency cooling strategies and systems such as air containment, rear-door cooling, in-row cooling, or liquid cooling. It is important to note that cooling solutions need to be specifically tailored to each data centre environment, taking into consideration specific factors including geographical location, facility characteristics, power consumption and rack density.
As greenhouse gas emissions, increasingly become a key consideration for IT leaders and businesses in Singapore, rightsizing becomes an important lever for companies to pull to reduce IT carbon footprints. Businesses, especially those planning their first data centre, would do well to invest time in careful upfront planning before embarking on a project, and may also want to seek advice and support from external experts in the field to execute a comprehensive rightsizing process.
Rightsizing for the good of the environment, the business and Singapore’s economy
Beyond the sustainability benefits of energy savings and carbon footprint reduction mentioned above, rightsizing done right can also enable business benefits for organisations in Singapore. As a result of a smaller physical footprint, rightsizing helps simplify management and reduce maintenance costs. It also improves the data centre’s operational reliability by reducing the risk of equipment failure and downtime. Additionally, associated practices such as virtualisation and automation give businesses greater agility and efficiency, allowing them to easily scale infrastructure up or down without the need for significant upfront infrastructure investments.
From a broader perspective, encouraging rightsizing as a best practice in data centre design will be key in helping Singapore strike the delicate balance between maintaining its data centre market growth and supporting the government’s climate change commitment. Known for its year-round tropical temperatures and land scarcity, the country has invested heavily in new technologies and efficiency innovations to support its data centre sustainability agenda. The Singapore government has also implemented sustainability guidelines and regulations for new data centres, including the use of sustainable energy and efficient cooling methods.
With such a robust data centre sustainability agenda and support in place, Singapore is leading the way for the rest of the region to step up their own initiatives to minimise the collective environmental impact of new data centres. As more and more countries place high priority on sustainability and energy efficiency, rightsizing data centres from the start is no longer an option, but a critical first step in the design and construction process to ensure data centres are optimised for sustainable operations.
Christophe Maisonnave is the director of Cloud Services for Apac at HPE
