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EDITOR’S QUESTION
DR STU REDSHAW, FOUNDER
AND CHIEF TECHNOLOGY
OFFICER, EKKOSENSE
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019 has seen a renewed focus
on climate issues, with Extinction
Rebellion protests in London
successfully disrupting the capital and
Theresa May committing the UK to
becoming the first G7 nation to make zero
net emissions a legislated goal.
Climate is now dominating the social, political
and corporate agenda, and demanding
long-term commitments are being made.
Government figures suggest that total UK
decarbonisation will require an investment
equivalent to 1–2% of GDP through 2050
and some estimate the total cost for the UK
to exceed a trillion pounds overall.
Clearly someone’s going to have to foot
this bill and there’s every likelihood that the
green taxes spotlight will fall increasingly on
the highest energy consumers. And, given
the amount of energy used by today’s
data centres, it’s hard to imagine that our
industry will escape an increased focus on its
power usage and management.
The combination of 2018’s exceptionally
hot summer, uncertain data centre capacity
levels due to the continued shift towards
public cloud services and the move towards
less efficient Edge centres has made efficient
operation much harder to achieve.
According to global data centre authority
the Uptime Institute, average Power Usage
Effectiveness (PUE) numbers have actually
increased recently, with a rise from 1.58 in
2018 to 1.67 over the last 12 months.
Many data centre operators have simply
hidden behind their critical facilities status to
avoid serious scrutiny of their energy usage.
Although it’s understandable that DC teams
should prioritise risk avoidance for their
critical services, the standard practice of
www.intelligentcio.com
simply adding more and more expensive
cooling hardware to handle escalating
capacity demands is storing up a serious
carbon issue for organisations trying to move
to net zero.
As a result, data centres aren’t doing
enough to optimise energy performance.
The reality for data centre operators is that
they now need to move beyond incremental
improvements to achieve this goal.
The good news though is that for the vast
majority of operational DCs, straight-forward
options are available to address the issues.
For example, with the latest release of our
cloud-based 3D data centre monitoring,
management and optimisation software,
we have added a unique integrated
Cooling Adviser capability that offers clear
recommendations of actions that operations
teams can immediately take to adapt their
data centre’s operational performance and
minimise environmental impact.
These recommendations alone can unlock
data centre cooling carbon reductions of
at least 10% without the requirement
for radical redesigns or expensive cooling
refresh programmes. It’s this kind of
accessible, practical ‘expertise as a service’
that can make a real difference for data
centre operators – giving them a head start
on energy reduction before the carbon
reduction team starts knocking on the door.
INTELLIGENTCIO
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