The Environment

Energy & the Environment

What part do the data center and IT industry have to play in the efforts to reduce the impact of carbon emissions on our environment?

One trend we cannot get away from is that of increasing energy consumption in the data center. While there is just as much (if not more) energy consumed in the end-user computing environment, the fact that data centers represent huge quantities of densely packed IT equipment, often under-utilised, makes them easy targets for the environmental pressure groups.

Many NGOs, including Greenpeace, have turned their attention to try and pressure the industry into improving, by highlighting flaws in matters like the industry's floundering efforts to define energy efficiency metrics.

Greenpeace recently ran a story about PUE, arguably the industry's only widely accepted metric for data centre efficiency, highlighting that PUE alone could not be used as an environmental impact indicator. Their examples illustrated how a good PUE could be quite the opposite when taking the carbon intensity of the supply energy into account.

The chart below illustrates their point nicely.

At Romonet, we believe that the only way to bring the environment into the everyday discussion of how we build and run data centers as well as IT services, is to clearly show the cost (environmental and financial) of building and running those services. We've spent over three years developing software to do exactly that!

Predict, Manage and Account the cost to your business and the environment.