Deleting emails won’t alleviate the drought, informed cloud choices might, says datacentre CEO

Dawn Childs, CEO of Pure Data Centres Group, says we all need to be more aware of the trade-offs inherent in cloud computing

Government advice that householders should consider “deleting old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems,” met with ridicule in the press and social media this week.

The National Drought Group, in whose report the advice features, was accused variously (and rather unfairly) of blaming the consumer, diverting attention away from water companies and big tech and failing to understand the technology. In fact the advice constitutes one line at the end of a much broader look at the UK’s water supply deficit.

How much water would really be saved if the population en masse deleted their email archives and holiday pics? In the grand scheme of things probably not much - and neither would taking shorter showers, another piece of advice.

But there’s a wider educational point, says Dame Dawn Childs, CEO of Pure Data Centres Group. We’re encouraged to store data in the cloud for convenience, but we’re rarely made aware of the consequences and trade-offs that this entails.

Out of sight and out of mind means most of us store gigabytes of data that we will likely never look at again. Maintaining digital photos on Google Cloud, iCloud or Dropbox necessarily require more energy and cooling keeping them on a flashdrive in a drawer. Just how much energy will depend on the particular datacentre where they are stored, its location and how it cools its servers, but it won’t be zero.

“There's probably a higher level intervention that could be helpful, which is around giving people more of an understanding about the impact of all of the things that they're doing digitally,” Childs told Computing.

Given the growing centrality of data centres and cloud computing to many aspects of life, it’s vital that the energy and water use implications of their choices are explained to people, she said, while adding that deleting email archives to save energy and water would be “dancing in the margins” as the capacity required to meet the proliferation of new data greatly outstrips that required to maintain the old.

But Childs said she was concerned that just as more awareness of environmental trade-offs is needed, some decisions are being taken out of peoples’ hands. Even if we wish to choose a more efficient option, we can’t, a case in point being the AI summaries pushed by search engines.

“Before you’d get whole bunch of links, and that used probably a tenth of the power of the curated paragraph. And currently, users aren't given the choice. You can switch off this AI curation, if you go down ten layers and figure out how to do it, but it's really difficult to understand.

“So I think if there was better information available to allow users to make appropriate choices, that might then help [reduce] the significant proliferation of data.”

Computing’s interview with Dawn Childs in which she discusses energy efficiency in datacentres, power grid bottlenecks and the potential for datacentres to become integral parts of their local communities will be published shortly.