Sustainable Data Centres – The reality (Guest blog by Carbon3IT Ltd)
What is Sustainability?
Sustainability is defined as “"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
When it comes to ICT and thus data centres, this is a problematic statement, as in its current form the ICT industry and by extension the data centres cannot be considered to be sustainable in any way, shape, or form.
There needs to be a fundamental rethink of how we deliver ICT to users, and it is end-to-end from our extraction of raw materials, the processing of those raw materials, the energy and carbon emitted during manufacturing, the transportation for those phases, the use phase and finally what we do with eWaste.
And that’s all before anything is put into a data centre! We, or rather the ICT manufacturers need to address this and quickly.
What they decide to do will have an impact on the way we design, build and operate data centres as they, after all, are making the equipment that we are looking after.
So, what is Data Centre Sustainability?
There is work underway at various organisations to define “sustainability” as it applies to DCs, however in the absence of a strict definition and any legislation relating to sustainability (at the moment) for DCs it remains a serious flaw in pursuing a true comparison between operators.
And this uncertainty gives rise to competing claims as to what is a sustainable DC, is it one that uses renewable energy? Is it one that uses HVO as a substitute for Diesel in their generators? Is it one that captures and uses rainwater in its cooling solution? Is it one that has a building certification such as LEED or BREEAM? Is it one that has ISO accreditations, such as ISO14001 or ISO50001? Is it one that has signed up to various industry pacts or accords?
I’d say No, and it’s simple really, faced with an existential threat of climate change and the impacts forecasted, we’ve kept our heads in the sand and still think we can do things the way we’ve always done them with some tinkering around the edges, a bit of free cooling here, a bit of HVO there and Bobs your uncle, we’ve become sustainable.
This cannot and will not address the issues we face, we have to do better, we need to undertake that radical rethink I mentioned earlier of everything we do and the way we do it, and that starts with Risk!
The concept of Risk!
Let’s not forget the purpose of a data centre is to…
Deliver digital services to internal and external customers at the lowest possible cost depending on the organisational risk profile.
We need to re-evaluate the sectors perception of risk, do the risks still exist? Are the risks and our mitigation of those risks still applicable in the 21st century?
This evaluation is contained within the EN50600-1 standard, the business risk analysis which leads us to our decisions on availability and protection classifications and the design and implementation process. The problem is that many organisations are appearing to “leapfrog” this initial risk analysis and thus merely accepting what we did in the past to be gospel and that approach leads to nothing much changing, or in essence stagnation!
And we will continue to stagnate until we undertake that fundamental review I spoke of earlier.
Trigger
In my opinion, the trigger for a deep and meaningful change to the sustainability of data centres will come from 3 sources, the first will be legislation. The second is the access to, and availability of power and there has been a lot of commentary on this in the past year, largely as a result of the various moratoriums. The 3rd and final element is “people power”, people don’t want to live next to soulless humming featureless buildings where local employment is limited to cleaning and security and are beginning to make their feelings known, we ignore them at our peril.
So, how do we change?
We are largely at the whim of the ICT manufacturers, and you could argue that this radical rethink is already underway with developments in graphene, quantum, DNA storage systems, Neuromorphic technology, Optical and Distributed computing etc but how close are these “ideas” to everyday use?
Until these “concepts” become mainstream we have to live with what we have now, and what we have now is largely unchanged since the 1960s.
What will change our thinking is…
Carbon Footprints
Impending legislation will require the calculation of operational carbon for sure, and embodied carbon in the future. Operational carbon is relatively easy for GHG Scopes 1 and 2, Scope 1 being diesel and refrigerant gases used on site, and Scope 2 being purchased electricity, steam or cooling (depending on location), Scope 3 is however, very difficult to calculate and this covers everything else.
At the moment only a few suppliers are able to provide these scope 3 numbers upon request, but I expect this to grow as the world moves forward to a more sustainable future.
Conclusion – Sustainability, nobody said it would be easy!
The data centre sector together with EVERY other sector is going to have to undertake a deep and radical rethink to each our net zero and sustainability goals, and we have started, but we’re tinkering around the edges, a bolder approach is necessary!
Authors
John Booth
John Booth is a well-known figure in EU data centre circles, primarily for his role as reviewer for the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres (Energy Efficiency) (EUCOC) (https://e3p.jrc.ec.europa.eu/communities/data-centres-code-conduct) programme and his work with the Certified Energy Efficiency Data Centre Award (CEEDA) (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/ceeda/) & Data Centre Alliance Certification https://dca-global.org/data-centre-certification) (which assesses data centres to a subset of the EUCOC best practices and EN 50600 respectively.)