Data centers, also known as the server farm or the computer room are where the majority of an enterprise´s servers and storage are located, operated and managed. A data center is a facility that stores, manages, processes, and exchanges digital data and information, providing application services or management for various data processing, such as web hosting Internet, intranet, telecommunication and information technology. Data centers are found in nearly every areas of the economy: financial services, media, high-tech, universities, government institutions, and many others which use and operate data centers to help business processes, information management, and communications functions.
The increasing demand for storage, networking and computation has driven intensification of large complex data centers that run many of today’s Internet, financial, commercial and business applications. Data a centers consume large amounts of electricity, they comprises of many thousands of servers and can use as much energy as small city. The demand for more information and superior analyses of data, along with a gradually rising need to store information, is causing the growth in the number and size of data centers. This growth in turn comes with an augment in the amount of energy consumed, including energy necessary to both power and cool the data centres computer equipment and facility system respectively.
The main problem in data centres is that a significant portion of the energy used is not going to the computers, but to power to the facility and cool the data centre. Data center energy usage can generally be divided into two mainly groups, IT systems (hardware and software) and the required supporting infrastructure (power and cooling systems) of the data center facility itself. Typical data centre energy consumption is attributed by 52% to equipment IT load such as processor, sever power supply , communication equipment and storage, and by 48% to facilities such as HVAC and lighting facilities, which in turn account for 54% of energy total consumption in buildings.
Direct electricity used by information technology (IT) equipment, cooling and power distribution in data centers represented about 1% of total world electricity consumption by 2005. In addition, this sector also is responsible for around 2% of global CO2 emissions approximately the same as the airline industry. Data centres are becoming “electricity guzzlers”, where the server farms alone contribute 200 million tons of CO2 of the total CO2 emissions globally. According to the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory (LBNL), data centers rank among the most energy-intensive types of Facilities (HVAC and lighting), using as much as 100 times the energy per square foot of a typical building. From 2005 to 2010, server consumption across the world data centres required additional capacity equal to more than 10 additional 1,000 MW power plants. Based on current trends, energy consumed by data centers will continue to grow by 12% per year, due to the growing demand from new services and users, resulting in an increase in GHG emissions. Electricity consumption (as a whole) in Western Europe is estimated to increase from a level of 56 terawatt hours (TWh) per year in 2007 to 104 (TWh) per year by 2020, with data centre power consumption playing a major part in this increase.
Based on current and foreseeable trends, the basic price of energy will continue to rise over time, and may become constrained as global demands rise, making energy use and efficiency a long term business priority. Moreover, Carbon footprint and greenhouse gases are also becoming subject to governmental regulations and taxes. According to The Green Grid report, there are now 28 types of energy policies affecting data centers in 12 EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) countries. Therefore, the rapidly increasing electricity demand for data center operation has motivated efforts to have a better understanding of current data center energy use as well as to identify strategies that reduce the environmental impact of these buildings.
In today’s world, it is almost impossible to discuss any business operation without considering efficiency. The goal for every data center owner or operator is to increase the energy efficiency without impacting on reliability. According to Uptime institute survey over 1,100 data centers around the world in 2012, data centre companies are looking for different energy efficiency strategies related with new cooling solutions that meet the demands of the hardware and the room, while optimizing energy efficiency. Environmental protection agency (EPA) has explored three energy-efficiency scenarios: improved operation, best practices and state-of-the-art, in order to develop a better understanding of energy efficiency, thus, illustrating a significant potential for efficient technologies and practices to improve the energy efficiency of IT equipment and site infrastructure. If state-of-the-art technologies were adopted in data centres, energy efficiency could be improved by as much as 55 % compared to current efficiency trends, representing the maximum technical potential.
Data centre companies are taken different steps in order to go green and to be a more sustainable sector. They notice greater opportunities in data centre cooling, power management and consolidation of servers, followed by facilities management and implementation of standards in order to reduce the energy consumption. Efforts trying to reduce the power consumption have been seen in data centre companies in recent years in order to improve their energy performance. For instance, some companies are implementing more efficient cooling systems and reducing the required power equipment by implementing virtualization and more green IT operations related with servers, memory and networks. In addition, they are implementing power saving strategies such as hot/cold aisle containment, free cooling techniques and CFD (computational fluids dynamics) models, airflow management of temperatures, air side economizer, more efficient processors including 45-nanometer silicon and quad-core processors, and chip cooling technology in order to reduce the energy requirements in data centres.
Consequently, it can be seen that making the operation of data centers “greener” has become the main focus of many research activities recently, looking for an appropriate and more efficient energy management in their operations. Efforts has been made by data centre companies in order to reduce the power in data centres and improve their energy performance, through the implementation of different innovations in the software and hardware, as well as newer installations for cooling data centres. However, data centers have been catalogued as a crucial environmental issue which deserves closer attention, hence, this data centre industry need to be studied in more detail and much deeper.
