With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Reducing Carbon Footprint

September 19, 2022 Reducing carbon footprint is now at the forefront of almost every organisation's goals. However, the demand for data is at an all-time high, meaning data centres contribute up to 200 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in a year. There are a number of recommendations that data centre managers can follow to reduce their organisation's carbon fooprints. 

Choose a company that can design, manufacture and install a full power and cabinet solution under a single part number. By doing so, organisations can significantly reduce waste, packaging and the person hours and energy needed for more rigorous on-site assembly, while also saving on freight costs thanks to more efficient shipping logistics. Pre-configured cabinets will ship on shock pallets that are designed to absorb any vibrations during transportation and ensure the IT equipment racked inside the cabinets arrives safely.

As data centre managers and opeators around the globe try to keep up with rising compute demand, and more server capacity is deployed, they increasingly find value in moving their servers to the cloud. The growing reality of a remotely working world has accelerated this upward trend even more.

During migration, it's common to inadvertently leave behind or keep servers that aren't in use anymore. except that they continue to run, and run inefficently at that, in the background. Unused and underutilised servers, sometimes referred to as ghost servers, can add millions of pounds to an energy bill and place higher, unnecessary demand on the resources needed to support them.

You can identify these underutilised ghost servers by taking more dedicated steps to monitor power consumption trends. And although individual power use by device will vary based on workload, in general power consumption will increase with utilisation. By comparing consumption against known thresholds you can identify servers that may be idle or underutilised. And once intelligent power distribution units (PDUs) that monitor power at the outlet level are in place, it's beneficial to centralise monitoring and automate reporting with a data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) solution.