Support green data centres to meet ESG goals

Power-hungry data centres, by dint of their environmental impact, are some of the world’s biggest contributors to climate change. As it stands, 5% to 9% of global electricity consumption comes from digital technologies alone,¹ while Singapore has a 7% consumption rate of electricity by data centres.

In an effort to mitigate this ever-growing problem, Singtel, in line with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals, focuses on four key sustainability principles, with a special emphasis on  Climate Change and Environment. Optimising green data centres helps Singtel go a long way in achieving these goals, helping to reverse the damage caused by unsustainable data practices.

Through measures like these, the tech industry can make a considerable contribution while demonstrating the business benefits of going green by simply adopting renewable sources of energy.²

Creating environmentally sustainable businesses has long been a goal for conscientious entrepreneurs. As massive digitalisation has taken hold throughout the world, the focus on business sustainability has inevitably shifted to modernising data centres. In one stroke, the adoption of green data centres promotes renewable resources usage, cooling methods, and less consumption of water and energy, among others—helping to reduce the company’s environmental footprint.³

But where do we start? It’s important to understand that going green is a holistic process. In order to make the biggest impact, entrepreneurs have to look at their businesses and data centres as a single unit. Keep in mind that the creation of green data centres is not a question of building new infrastructure; existing centres can be reassessed and retrofitted to accommodate more environment-friendly technologies and advancements.

While the initial cost may seem daunting, the return on investment for green data centres can be considerable. In 2016, the value of the Global Green Data centre market was valued at USD 35.8 billion. That market is expected to reach a value of USD 148.22 billion by 2022.² In the long term, companies can expect to reduce costs on energy consumption, fuel consumption, and technological investments in legacy products.

Evaluate your current data centre.

What aspects of your data centre operations can be improved or redesigned to maximise the environmental dividend? This can mean anything from removing dead servers to improving airflow. Not all adjustments need to be costly. Sometimes you can get results by simply rearranging the way servers are set up. Dedicate time to analyse how this can be done.

Assess the technologies available to you.

One of the key areas to tackle when building a green data centre is energy consumption and efficiency.

Data and AI-Management can help by configuring servers to consume less energy outside of peak hours. This can be achieved, primarily, by virtualisation, which helps measure and monitor power consumption. Data gathered from this process can then be used for further optimisation.

Additionally, virtual management aids in reducing hardware needs, making the data centre more energy efficient. This way, server consumption and cooling systems’ power consumption are reduced.

Airflow structure. Waste heat from machines is a major contributing factor to global warming. Large data centres produce huge amounts of waste heat, which can be mitigated by airflow redesign. The simple act of cooling a data centre may take up about 40% of a company’s energy consumption³. Simply rethinking the airflow in a data centre can significantly reduce the energy needed to cool down machines.

Some examples of airflow restructure include:⁴

●       Cool and hot aisles, where hot air is pumped into an air conditioner and circulated back as cold air

●       Free air cooling, where outdoor air is used in cooler climates

●       Evaporative cooling, where heat is reduced through water evaporation

●       Heat recovery and reuse, where heat from the data centre is used to heat other facilities

Virtualisation allows for more efficient energy usage. By using cloud-managed services, enterprises can decentralise their technological needs and reduce expenditures for hardware and similar materials.

Singtel has multiple data centres that meet international environmental requirements and standards. By shifting to cloud-managed services, enterprises can immediately reduce their energy consumption in big data centres. Its use of NEWater, for example, could aid in the cooling of data centres. Aside from this, they also engage in diesel rotary uninterruptible power supply devices (DRUPS), which lessen the use of batteries and other environmentally damaging chemicals.

Additionally, we have recently teamed up with Intel for a more sustainable 5G Multi-access Edge Compute incubator. Aside from an accelerated digital transformation, this partnership promises to both scale demand for higher performance and remain sustainable through energy-saving technologies. Currently, this new technology developed by Quanta and Intel is being trialled in Singtel Edge sites and promises to lower the temperature of CPUs to enhance power-saving efforts.

Decision-makers need to step back and look at the big picture to understand which aspects of their enterprise’s data centre can go green. And while the initial investment and effort may seem daunting, the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term trouble.

Over 60% of Fortune 500 companies are aiming towards efficiency and climate sustainability.³ With Singtel, you can be one of them. Speak to us to learn how.

References:

1. European Commission, Green cloud and green data centers

2. Rahi, Green Data Centers, 2022

3. IT Pro, How do you build a green data centre?, 2022

4. Tech Target, Green Data Center