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
At 24 kilowatts, such a rack configuration uses the same energy as 600
standard 40 watt light globes, 12 toasters or 10 electric ovens
A relatively modest 30,000 square foot data centre will now typically house
1,000 server racks
storage accounts for 37-40 percent of overall data-centre power
Power supply Conclusion
Approximately 70 per cent of the UK’s electrical power is generated As the enabling technologies become cheaper and more reliable,
from fossil fuels. Use of fossil fuels releases carbon, which had the number of organisations choosing to outsource the most
previously been locked under ground, into the atmosphere as carbon complicated parts of their IT infrastructure will inevitably grow.
dioxide. The unqualified use of fossil fuels is about as un-eco friendly There is plenty of green ground for data centres to make up,
as it gets and has lead to the creation of schemes that purport to how IT hardware is shipped from its place of manufacture to the
neutralise its effects. facility is a topic that is beginning to hot up, but at the moment
power is the key focus of activity. Consumers need to take a
Managed hosts often use carbon-offsetting schemes (of which a good look at how managed hosts are dealing with the power
classic example is tree planting, as trees absorb carbon) to promote issue to sort those jumping on the green bandwagon from the
their green credentials. However, once out of the ground and emitted real deal. n
into the atmosphere, fossil carbon joins the active carbon pool
and won’t return for many thousands of years. Even if tree-planting
schemes are effective, there is more carbon in circulation than there
would otherwise have been. Carbon offsetting schemes, in reality, are
greenwash that cover up business-as-usual data centre operations.
The term carbon neutral implies that the overall amount of carbon in
circulation remains the same. Biomass fuel is usually composed of
agricultural or forestry products grown specifically for the purpose
of replacing fossil fuels in power generation. It contains only carbon
already in circulation in the environment, albeit temporarily locked
into plant form. However, releasing biomass-derived carbon into the
atmosphere is only neutral if a similar quantity of carbon is taken up by
new biomass. This depends on the lag time between carbon release
and re-absorption, and whether biomass farming is undertaken
sustainably. Carbon neutral schemes are better than carbon offsetting
but still have a light coat of greenwash.
Renewable power supplies, wind, wave, tide, hydro and solar do
not release any carbon into the atmosphere during power generation
and as such the energy produced has been dubbed, ‘zero carbon’.
Managed hosts that adopt zero carbon schemes to power their data
centres can really do no more and should be recognised as the
greenest of the green.
ecoexecutive | 68
Green data.indd 68 18/4/08 16:29:55
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