Making data centres more sustainable

Data centres are an increasingly important part of global infrastructure, but can they ever be green?

Can data centres ever be 'green'? Given the rapid growth of cloud services and the data centre capacity that underlies them and the imperative to reduce humanity's environmental impact, this question requires an urgent response. It was tackled by panellists during Computing's inaugural Tech Impact summit last week.

First some good news. While data centre workloads have increased rapidly over the past decade, the overall energy used to power them has barely shifted over that time, as a result of more efficient technology and building designs, and an larger proportion of workloads going to 'hyperscale' cloud vendors whose enormous facilities afford them multiple energy use efficiencies.

Facts and figures

• Number of data centres: 8,000 globally (source: US International Trade Commission) - or 8.5 million if include the enterprise data centres and small server rooms (source: Datamation)
• Data centre growth: Capacity is expected to be 25 per cent more in 2026 than it was in 2020 (source: Statista)
• Cooling: As much energy (or more) is used in cooling data centres as in providing for computing power
• Water use: In 2021, a 15 MW data centre in the USA was reported to use up to 360,000 gallons (1,363 cubic metres) of water a day (source: Data Centre Frontier)
• Market: the global data centre market is worth around $60 billion

John Booth, Carbon3IT

Astounding losses

However, said John Booth, CEO of Carbon3IT, data centres could be a lot more sustainable than they are today. He pointed to the "astounding losses" incurred between power generation and the CPU, citing studies that indicate that only 0.5 per cent of the energy generated at a power station is actually used on the chip. In part this is due to the need to transform power down in stages from the grid, but, says Booth, hardware manufacturers could still make some quick sustainability gains by using more efficient transformers and other components. Meanwhile, data centre managers could make better use of their equipment.

Data centres are built to house IT equipment, and IT equipment is "terribly inefficient", he said. Moreover, servers often operate at a very low utilisation rate and are left on standby unnecessarily.

"You wouldn't have your Jaguar parked out on your drive with the engine running just in case you want to go down to the shops, but we actually do that with some of the services that operate 24 X 7 X 365," said Booth.

This energy wasted manifests as extra heat, which then needs to be dealt with.

"The two sources of heat in the server are the chips and the transformer, and I think we could do a lot more on eliminating the heat from that transformer side," Booth said.

On the chip side, there have been recent advances in graphene transistor technology which promises chips that emit very little heat, and "could be an absolute game changer for this industry", although this is still at the laboratory stage.

For now, though, a data centre company like Virtus, which has a goal of being Net Zero on emissions by 2030, needs to work with what's available. It's a continuous learning process, says IT Director Paul Jennings. The company is REGO certified as using 100 per cent renewable energy and has reduced its water use by 40 per cent by changing the way it cools its facilities, but as it expands Jennings said it needs to look at building standards too.

"We need to be showing that excellence within build as well, so how can we efficiently build with that sustainability agenda in mind," he said.

The World Green Building Council says that all new buildings need to be net zero by 2030 and all buildings by 2050. Factors to consider in meeting these goals include the carbon embedded in the facility's concrete, steel and equipment. The data centre's location is critically important too, because of the power generation that feeds the grid. Electricity generated from dirty lignite could be releasing 800 g of CO2 per kilowatt, whereas in hydro-powered Norway that figure is just 12 g. And there are other location-related considerations too, including traffic to and from the data centre.

Huseyin Seker, Associate Dean Research & Enterprise at Birmingham City University, mentioned some promising experiments in this regard, one being Microsoft's underwater data centre and another Ebay's decade-old Projec Topaz,which uses 400V power distribution, allowing it to eliminate a number of transformers, and which is cooled using rain water and air, allowing for increased operational densities.

Ebay's system uses machine learning systems to regulate cooling and Seker sees many advantages in increasing the use of automation to minimise data centre's environmental impact.

"AI and machine learning, models and systems are useful for several different purposes. For example, to maximise uptime optimise energy usage, and also being used to decide how much air cooling is is necessary," he said, adding that the hyperscalers have all developed their own in-house AI/ML tools for such use cases.

When evaluating the total environmental impact of a data centre, the most complex issue is the wider supply chain, the emissions side of which are covered by Scope 3 of the GHG Protocol . As well as the servers and storage hardware purchased, this also covers the impact of the networks that deliver the data to and from the data centre. Virtus's Jennings admitted this is a challenge, but it's one he approaches by careful selection of partners and collaboration.

"In minimising our footprint, I'm constantly working with the supply chain. One of my strategy themes is having a strong partner ecosystem in that is sustainability, but it's a constant learning job and there isn't a magic answer," he said.

Standards

Efforts to ‘green' data centres are not helped by inconsistency in the quality of standards. It can be hard to know where to start.

"There is no one standard to ‘rule them all'," said Carbon3IT's Booth. "And that's probably because it's a very complicated area. How do you put sustainability standards on supply chain equipment?"

The some of the important standards are listed below. Two ISO standards - ISO 14001 and ISO 50001 - are the main areas of focus at Virtus.

ISO 14001, which covers environmental management, is a requirement for UK public sector contracts, whereas 50001 deals with energy management.

"We believe they're both very worthwhile. They can be complex to navigate but they bring a lot of advantages to a DC operator," said Jennings.

Paul Jennings, Virtus

There are other ISO standards that data centre managers should acquaint themselves with, too, the pannelists said, including ISO/IEC 30134, a series of KPIs covering Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), server energy efficiency metrics and utilisation efficiency factor metrics for carbon and water.

Standards, guides and metrics

• PUE - Power entering a data centre divided by the power used to run the computing infrastructure
• REGO - The Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin (REGO) scheme provides transparency to consumers about the proportion of electricity that suppliers source from renewable generation
• Water - there are few general standards around data centre water use
• ITU-T - A series of recommendations for green data centres by the International Telecommunications Union
• REC - Renewable Energy Certificates - a market mechanism to promote the use of renewable energy
• US Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environment (LEED) a sustainable building certification programme
• ISO 14001 - sets out the criteria for an environmental management system
• ISO 50001 - based on the management system model of continual improvement of energy management
• ISO/IEC 30134 - specifies the energy reuse factor (ERF) as a KPI to quantify the reuse of the energy consumed in a data centre
• EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres EN50600 - a series of best practices including data centre, design, build and operate standards and sustainability (EN50600 99-2)
• BREEAM - data centre design criteria

Smart and green

Thinking in terms of sustainability can be quite a pivot for a traditional data centre engineer. In any case, data centre design and management has often been bolted onto traditional computer science or engineering degrees. There is an urgent need for more specialists in all manner of data centre management including sustainability 2030 goals said Seker. As it is, the current best practice is to build multidisciplinary teams.

"We need to close that skills gap. Unfortunately, when we look at higher education, I'm afraid there is a very small number of degree programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels that specialise in data centres," Seker said. "And also this programme should not only cover classic big data centres, but also we need to look at the micro data centres and training related to these data centres as well.

"When developing and delivering such training programmes, we need to foucus on data centres becoming smart and green: not only smart, not only green but both. It may not be a only degree programmes it may be a part of the continuous professional development, short courses or or long programmes."

There are signs that the need for data centre specialists is becoming recognised by the industry. In the meantime companies such as Schneider Electric are using their own resources to try to close the gap, training about 1,500 critical environment technicians who it then employed to run its own data centres.

Virtus is in the process of setting up its own training scheme in data centre sustainability matters for internal staff as part of its quality and engineering training division. It is also exploring the circular economy, reselling and refurbishing equipment rather than ditching it.

Meanwhile Booth advised a more hands on approach to contractors, saying he'd seem "appalling examples" of servers being improperly installed and airflows being blocked.

"I would have an induction for every new guy that comes on site and say, 'well, this is the way that we do things here'."

As data centres become an ever more important part of the infrastructure, they increasingly compete with other industries and domestic users for energy, water and land. Energy and water efficiency improvements over the last few years have been impressive, but the industry cannot afford to rest on its laurels as there is still much waste to tackle, and issues such as sustainable building practices (2030 is only eight years away) have yet to receive the attention required.

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