Data Centres and The Environment - What are the issues and opportunities?

We are having a strategy session for companies involved in creating. staffing, managing and suppling Data Centers.

I am looking for information about how the Data Centers and the Environment.

Please feel free to share a little about how your company and or its products have impacts on the environment and what some of that impact is for your customers.

As usual, I will be summarizing the answers on my site www.ZaleTabakman.ca - please select LinkedIn Answers from the tags on the right to see some of my previous summaries.

Answers sent to me privately are quoted anonymously, all other answers are listed by their authors.
The answer, Zale, will vary by the type of user and data center. Service providers have in the past had little motivation to achieve higher levels of efficiency or to lessen environmental impact, and in today's supply constrained market, that still holds true, though there are marketing benefits for modest improvements. For single-tenant sites, the benefits of higher efficiency, and the corporate benefits of minimizing the environmental impact (noise, etc.) on the surrounding community can be substancial.

In Europe there are strong peer pressures to be energy efficient. At BT we have developed a strategy and 21st Century Data Centre design that uses 60% less energy than conventional data centres. This simultaneously gives is a commercial advantage as well as a marketing edge in the green space.

In addition for the need to become "green" (using less power and cooling as new processors consume more) data centers professionals are working on server virtualization, which many feel is more of a concept than a reality. Data centers with mainframes are finding it increasingly difficult to find support staff as these many of these experts are or have retired.
Data center outsourcing is increasing (studies show 8 to 13%) as the need for security and robust infrastructure increases.

I don't know what eco-strategies are in place in North America, but over here in Europe and particularly the UK, there is a new push for greener technologies, particularly where they converge on a single, overcrowded, limited footprint site - the Datacenter.

The environmental pressures are expressed to businesses in the form of requirements for compliance to environmental regulations and legislations, such as the WEEE* directive or RoHS**. Added to these compliance issues are the business costs of managing the additional power and environmental requirements resulting from engineering more and more processing poer into a smaller and smaller physical footprint (think BladeServers and 1U appliances).

Another concept, not yet incorporated into legislation but already loosely defined in marketing-speke and bandied about as a measure of an organisation's eco-profile is the "carbon footprint", which will take factors like power consumption, heating and heat dissipation, lighting, building materials into account, but also cost of support and maintenance in terms of employee travel to and from site, DR overheads, resilience and redundancy etc, etc, etc...

Vendors, Distributors, resellers and end customers are now moving to an understanding of these issues, and we are now seeing Datacenters being designed with those criteria in mind, so we are seeing the deployment of such hitherto esoteric ideas as:

- More space-efficient, reduced-footprint server and comms rack cabinets (nifty sliding/folding doors, better equipment access with narrower aisles)
- Water-cooled rack cabinets (3,500-fold efficiency increase on traditional aircon)
- Remote, converged and consolidated centralised management of *all* Datacenter elements (carbon footprint savings in terms of reduction of callouts, employee travel, subsistence, fuel, onsite heating/lighting etc)
- Next Generation, high-efficiency (0.96+) Power Management (extended runtime UPS/battery back-up/DC-AC rectification and power distribution) - less power consumption and higher output, and again, carbon footprint savings in terms of reduction of callouts, employee travel, subsistence, fuel, onsite heating/lighting etc)

...this is just a taster... there are more "joined-up" technologies emerging month-on-month. I recently attended a seminar on this very subject, run by a UK Distributor, Zycko. The links below are to vendors/manufacturers in their portfolio, but they are by no means unique - check out the technologies and then start researching the capabilities and offerings of your own local suppliers - mosyt of the ones listed below are NA-based anyway.
References:

*WEEE - Waste, Electrical & Electronic Equipment Directive
**RoHS - Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive

Links:

http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/weee/ - The WEEE Directive
http://www.rohs.gov.uk - The RoHS Directive
http://www.zycko.com/data-centre - data center-centric information, including eco-environmentals
http://www.eaton.com - data center power management
http://www.powerware.com - data center power management
http://www.epicenterinc.com - Epicenter Centerline remote systems management
http://www.usystemsnet.com - USystems ColdLogik Water Cooling solutions and USpace data center rack cabinets, wallmount boxes and accessories

Links:
http://www.zycko.com/news/coverage/zycko-april07/Can_green_data_centres_exi...
http://www.epicenterinc.com
http://www.powerware.com

Well, there are some obvious "environmental issues" surrounding data centers that center on the fact that they introduce a very high density of computing equipment:

1. Cooling requirements tend to be really hefty because of very high densities of both computers (e.g. - CPUs and memory) as well as sizable arrays of disk drives.

Of course, some benefits of "economies of scale" might be had if you can ensure high usage levels of all of the equipment. Unfortunately, the need for High Availability often means that the amount of hardware is immediately doubled or even tripled, with little opportunity to ensure High Usage.

2. The act of delivering expensive and delicate servers and components to the data center means that it has a remarkable density of trash generation in the form of the packaging used to safely deliver these items.

(And note that if you have redundant servers, that means delivering packing materials for those redundant servers...)

We once got warned by a data center that the stack of empty boxes was getting to be a fire hazard; that's one of the risks of aggressive build-out plans.

Vendors that make it possible to return and reuse that packaging could provide some big benefits in this regard.

3. Battery backup and alternative power can put even more "environmental undesirables" into the location, between the stacks of lead/acid batteries, and diesel generators.

I have heard rumors that fuel cells might be well suited to replace some of these "environmental nasties," but various of the common sorts of fuel cells introduce significantly dangerous components of their own.

4. All of the above need cooling, hence mandating *enormously* powerful air conditioning units.

There's quite the multiplicative requirement, here; you need servers, and duplicates, and cooling for them all, and power and cooling to cover ALL of this.

These are all pretty much downsides to Data Center usage.

In principle, there could be an environmental upside, though it's unlikely, thus far. And that is that if you can push most of the computing power into the data center, you could then have Really Wimpy hardware at the office, that is, non-powerful near-diskless machines that are small and consume little power, such as the AMD Geode, which consumes just 5 watts.

Unfortunately, deploying modern versions of Windows on the desktop pretty much mandates having as big and powerful a desktop computer as you can get; I doubt we'll see any improvement on that without Microsoft becoming marginalized in favor of Linux and MacOS.