The data centre is the first and most obvious place the IT industry has looked in addressing its overzealous consumption of power.
"A data centre is the single biggest computing draw you can make," said Brad Engstrom, business development manager for Cisco Australia. "Look at Google — they choose where to put their data centre based on the availability of power".
With many organisations opting to use virtualisation to maximise their use of server capacity, power consumption in individual racks is climbing as high as 20, 24 and 40 kilowatts per rack.
Mark Deguara, national product manager for cooling vendor Emerson Network Power, points out that at 24 kilowatts, such a rack configuration uses the same energy as 600 standard 40 watt light globes, 12 toasters or 10 electric ovens. "We're [working on] a data centre at the moment that's 20 kilowatts per rack, and we're talking to a client looking at 30 kilowatts per rack, and another [client is building a room] which is 50 kilowatts per rack."
A 'green' data centre?
At the same time that power consumption is increasing in the data centre, several hardware vendors are using the "greening" of IT as a means of differentiating themselves from competitors.
However, with data centres chewing through enormous amounts of power, is it an oxymoron to consider any data centre "green"?
"No," said David Scott, managing director of cooling specialists Emerson Network Power. "It's not an oxymoron because there are clear things all of us can do and we are doing to maximise energy efficiency. The IT hardware suppliers are continually supplying new equipment that requires less energy and therefore improving energy efficiency."
Barrie Williams, regional director of Intel Solution Services, said it needs to be remembered that being "green" is merely a concept — and not an absolute.
A data centre, he argued, could be considered "green" in that it more efficiently processes applications that would otherwise be processed manually in a distributed fashion. An efficient data centre, he said, is actually off-setting less power-efficient work that would otherwise be done elsewhere.
"Data centres are very hungry on power — that's true — but if you look at other manufacturing or retail organisations, right across the whole supply chain there are real energy-efficiency issues," he said.
"[Consider] a retail organisation and how they transport goods and refrigerate goods within the supermarkets. The data centre is only one component. Yes, it is very hungry, but not the most hungry".
Kris Kumar, managing director of Sydney-based data centre design specialists 3iGroup, can think of 50 or 100 ways one might improve the energy efficiency of a data centre — but he said that for a data centre to be "green" is "practically impossible to achieve".
"Power-hungry beasts can't really be green in the true sense of the word," said Kumar.
"Calling a data centre 'green' is like saying your four-wheeled drive car is green because it gets a little bit better gas mileage," added Cisco's Engstrom.
Talkback
This article makes a great point but I think it is important we keep a couple of things in mind.
First and foremost, we are not an environmentally friendly species. There are just so many of us it may be that we never will be. To stretch the 4-wheel drive analogy, we could even revert to using horses but they would still produce methane.
However, it is important that we focus on minimising our impact and try to work towards sustainability as much as we possibly can. The Stern report did a good thing by reinforcing just how unsustainable our lifestyles were.
The same applies to IT but to a lesser extent - not because the resource demands from the IT industry isn't growing exponentially - but because it also present the developed world with opportunities to change our work & life practices to be less resource centric (travel less, use less physical resource, etc) ... the real question behind this one is - will we ever develop a sufficiently mature mindset to embrace the opportunities for cultural change presented by IT. Perhaps another discussion though!
A data centre will always need power, yes - and how that power is generated is not in this scope of this discussion (albeit perhaps relevant). However, as an industry we must press, and keep pressing, to reduce the power demands ... and we need to be continually questioning our governments, companies, partners and suppliers on their environmental credentials to ensure the message is not forgotten.