The 5 Pillars for Building a Smart Datacenter: #4 Resources and Energy Consumption

Intro

Welcome to the fourth (of five) eBook of the series: The 5 Pillars for Building a Smart Datacenter. What makes a datacenter “smart”? Is it a well-planned consumption of electricity? Or is it a wise use of the resources? Is it just software or does hardware play an important role as well? In these five Submer eBooks, we will describe the strategic, practical and economic pillars that you should take in consideration if you want to make your datacenter smarter and more sustainable.

1. PUE, DCiE and WUE
2. Power Density and Space Efficiency
3. Software Defined Power
4. Resources and Energy Consumption
5. Costs

In this fourth eBook, we will analyze the resources and energy consumption a datacenter needs to face and how it is possible to run a datacenter in a more sustainable way.

1. Resources and Energy Consumption

The global datacenter market is expected to reach revenues of about USD 304.87 billion during 2020-2024, according to experts’ forecast. The fast-paced growth of the new digital trends is responsible for the rapid expansion witnessed by datacenters and HPC. These new trends require the processing of large quantities of data, that translates into a necessity for greater computational capacity. In the last 30 years, the virtualization process and Moore’s Law (according to which the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years), resulted in a smarter, leaner distribution and management of the energy (today, the energy needed to process a certain amount of data has decreased by over six orders of magnitude). But that is just slowing down a process that cannot be stopped: our society needs datacenters and supercomputers. We have reached a point where we cannot simply think about the evolution of our socio-economic system without relying on datacenters.

Datacenters on their turn need to rethink their strategy to be more efficient and make sustainable innovation (the fourth most pressing concern of today datacenters along with energy efficiency, operating costs and security) not just a fancy marketing slogan, but a pillar to sustain the creation of a new generation of smart datacenters.