Environment

Energy & the Environment

What part do the data centre 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 it that of increasing energy consumption in the data centre. While there is just as much (if not more) energy consumed in the end-user computing environment, the fact that data centres represent huge quantities of densely packed IT equipment, often under-utilised, makes them easy targets for the environmentalist.

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

Greenpeace 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. In fact their examples illustrated how a good PUE could be quite the opposite when taking the supply energy carbon intensity 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 centres 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.