For decades now, datacenters have been known to consume significant amounts of power – a whopping 1.5 to 3 percent of the world’s total electricity.
Considering this, sustainability in the datacenter industry might appear as a paradox, particularly when we need more hyperscale datacenter parks to support specialised workloads of AI, eventually leading to more power consumption.
But the third reality of the datacenter industry is that, today, we have the capability to not only support AI workloads, but also leverage AI to achieve high levels of energy efficiency.
Here are the top five ways how new-age technologies can be leveraged to ensure sustainable datacenter operations.
1. AI in Design: First things first, the design of any datacenter lays the foundation of sustainable operations. Today, AI is capable of analysing data such as climatic conditions at the datacenter site and other environmental factors, thereby helping with material selection, ideal building designs, most suited energy optimisation practices, integration of renewable energy, and more.
2. Embracing Renewable Energy: With the global consensus on promoting renewable energy sources, combined with the government’s progressive policies, datacenter operators have greater access to renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, hydroelectric, and more.
3. Energy-Efficient Equipment: Servers and other IT equipment consume the largest share of power in datacenters, determining the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of the facility. Most datacenters today aim for the lowest possible PUE, which is also a key requirement for hyperscalers and enterprise customers. Thus, deploying new-age, energy-efficient equipment like storage devices, networking equipment, servers, etc can go a long way in optimising energy efficiency in a datacenter.
4. Advanced Cooling Systems: A critical element in any datacenter, cooling systems are required to operate 24×7, contributing significantly to the overall energy footprint. With the emergence of AI and GenAI applications, datacenters will become the compute powerhouse for training AI models, which requires advanced GPUs that need consistent and highly available cooling. Datacenters must adopt advanced and efficient cooling technologies like liquid cooling at the server level, immersion cooling, evaporative cooling, adiabatic chiller systems, among others.
5. Virtualization: Reducing hardware footprint is another effective method to minimise energy consumption in datacenters. It is the practice of running multiple virtual servers on a single physical server, thereby eliminating power consumption of multiple physical servers. This can be further complemented by workload optimisation practices to ensure optimum efficiency of servers.
Sustainability Outlook
In the wake of climate change concerns, it’s common knowledge that sustainability has become a global mandate, and India has set an aggressive target of Net Zero by 2070. Datacenter companies, as responsible businesses, must align themselves with this goal and adopt a sustainable approach to growth. The good news is that we have the required technology at our disposal, which will aid our journey of making this transition.
At CtrlS, sustainability lies at the core of what we do. We are bullish on building AI-ready datacenters with state-of-the-art, energy-efficient infrastructure and new-age capabilities such as liquid cooling. As part of our commitment to a green and sustainable planet, we have set an aim of achieving Net Zero by 2030.
marketing@ctrls.in