Welcome to the wave of the “socially responsible” datacenter, or not. The bottom line from the NGO Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) paper is that nearly half of the datacenters do not define energy efficiency objectives. They don’t even have an energy efficiency plan in place.
One of the references analysed is the survey conducted by Digital Realty Trust in January 2013 which concluded that only 20% of the 300 North American datacenter companies with revenues of at least $1 billion and/or more than 5,000 employees have a PUE below 2.0, with the average at 2.9.
The main recommended actions coming from this paper to the medium-large datacenter are basically the following:
- Measure and disclose your datacenter utilization metrics (including implementation of DCIM). Expose your utilization metrics in your customers bill!
- Especially for Co-lo facilities, create pricing models that incentivize your customers’ energy efficiency (maybe you can provide a cheaper kWh price for customers submerging servers).
- When possible, implement modular datacenters to improve operations and services.
- Get c-level (top managers) buy-in to align IT and facilities organizations to drive energy efficiency across the datacenter.
Implement Submer Smart Pods today and boost your Data Centers’ energy efficiency plan to the next level. Be truly socially and financially responsible.
