Green Datacenters, a Healthy Bottom Line for Enterprises
As years pass by, data centers are getting more common and essential. Data centers are indispensable for the smooth functioning of business processes, information management, and communications functions. Hence, today every sector of the economy use and operate data centers. Several factors are responsible for the rapid increase in the use of data centers. Let’s look at some of these factors.
· Accelerated growth in the use of the Internet
· Increased use of electronic transactions
· Shift from paper-based information to digital based
· Government regulations requiring digital records retention
· High performance scientific computing
The growth in the number of data centers led to increased use of energy. The result of which is
· Increase in the emission of greenhouse gases especially from electricity generation
· Increase in the demand for electricity which the existing power grids are finding difficult to meet
· Increase in the energy costs for both business and government
· Increase in capital costs as a result of expansion of data center capacity and building of new data centers
This led to increased interest in developing solutions for energy efficiency in the data center sector. As part of it, Congress passed public law 109-431 in 2006 entrusting Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to carry out a study through its Energy Star program to “analyze the rapid growth and energy consumption of computer data centers by the Federal Government and private enterprise.” The result was startling and predicted a bleak future in this sector. This accelerated the concept of green datacenters. A green datacenter is “a repository for the storage, management, and dissemination of data in which the mechanical, lighting, electrical and computer systems are designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimum environmental impact.” Building a green data center is quite expensive, as it requires low-emission building materials, carpets and paints, installation of catalytic converters on backup generators, alternative energy technologies such as photovoltaics, heat pumps, and evaporative cooling, and so on. However, cost savings do come in the form of energy savings, reduced carbon footprint, datacenter virtualization, lower operating and maintenance costs, and reduced environmental impact.
With several service providers offering effective green datacenter solutions, enterprises can now easily realize their objective of a healthy bottom line and a healthy environment. These service providers follow different methodologies to provide companies with solutions that are cost effective and sustainable.
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