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Future gazing – Five predictions for 2023
Astrid Wynne , Head of Sustainability at Interact , discusses the data centre industry ’ s responsibility to reduce environmental impact as well as outlining some of the more broader expectations of the industry in the new year .
Astrid Wynne is a Chartered Environmentalist and Interact ’ s Head of Sustainability . She is a qualified trainer for the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment ( IEMA ) certified professional development courses in sustainability and carbon . Wynne is also the Chair of the Sustainability Special Interest Group at the Data Centre Alliance and the lead author of the Data Centre Alliance ’ s inaugural Sustainability Best Practice whitepaper released in May 2022 .
Interact is a Sustainable IT company that uses industry knowledge , leading research and extensive analysis to recommend projects and actions designed to transform data centre efficiency and optimise server estate performance , saving companies in terms of energy , carbon and cost .
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1 . Energy ( in ) security
Data centre managers are going to have to understand a lot more about their IT hardware and how to optimise it . Energy availability is going to be an issue for at least the next two years . While the data centre industry has so far been sheltered from the rolling blackouts and energy rationing predicted in Europe this winter , it is clear that we ’ re going to have to do more with less on the electricity front . This means that the sector is going to have to look beyond traditional efficiency metrics for proven savings on the energy draw . The IT load represents around 65 % of the average data centre ’ s electricity usage and servers are 70 % of that . Removing wasteful machines from that estate , consolidating and improving configurations can result in 60 % savings overall .
We have seen a huge spike in interest in snapshots of server estates as a result . Rather than rely on the published results by SERT on server efficiency , more and more large organisations are coming to us for a more granular and accurate snapshot of their server estate . Our software measures on configuration of machine as well as make and model and includes data on the impact of type and number of CPUs as well as memory . The increased interest is coming from large financial institutions and the data centre sector , who want demonstrable energy reductions for the same workload by reconfiguring machines and migrating workloads off the most inefficient variations . It is more in-depth than the traditional approach to energy efficiency and much more effective too . www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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