industry news
THE ‘BIG BAD DATA POLICE’ WILL CALL UNLESS THERE IS
AN INCREASED FOCUS ON DATA CENTRE EFFICIENCY
With the data centre industry becoming one of
the fastest growing and power hungry sectors,
The Green Grid has urged data centre operators
to commit to energy efficient practices.
Without such practices in place, providers
will be unable to protect consumers from
excessive data restrictions as data centres
seek to satisfy customer demands against
dwindling energy supplies.
Roel Castelein (pictured), EMEA marketing
chair for The Green Grid, explained, ‘The
growth of global data centre activity, and its
energy consumption, are startling. According
to the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, data
exchanges have increased by 1,500 times
between 2000-2015, from processing 18
terabytes to 27,842 terabytes in that period.
This is an annual growth rate of 100 times,
with this figure set to expand even further with
each passing year. Combined with the fact that
data centres (the main powerhouses behind
this data exchange) consume two to three
per cent of global energy supplies, you have a
growing energy sustainability problem.
‘Looking at this issue from a groundlevel perspective, governments, companies
and individuals increasingly produce and
consume more data. Data needs electricity for
it to be stored, processed and sent. So Big
Data assumes either more electricity will be
generated, which will increase environmental
pollution through continued use of fossil fuels,
or data will be more efficiently handled against
the same amount of power.
‘If governments and companies decide to
rely upon increased energy generation, they
will not be able to keep up with the demands
of Big Data without significantly contributing
to environmental pollution levels. In this future,
how would the world look? Would governments
step in to regulate Facebook usage, only in
daylight hours? Would citizens have the right to
only 12 Google searches per day? Should we
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tax companies on their levels of data usage?
This might seem laughable now, but data
rationing is a likely outcome if we do not tackle
data growth and the underlying demands
placed on power consumption.
‘This is, of course, highly avoidable.
An alternative vision of the future is where
efficient use of technological resources save
the day. Today, an estimated 10 million servers
run idle, consuming energy and not processing
any tasks, meaning that potential efficiency
gains are extensive. Cold storage, for instance,
uses compute power only when necessary.
Distributed computing could be another part
of the solution. Instead of having all data
grouped in one central place, it would make
sense to have data processing at the base of a
cell tower, or even in a mobile phone. Carriers
could even propose to use idle mobile phone
capacity in return for a loyalty program. This
would divide up data processing and assign it
to the link in the value chain (device – network
– data centre) that makes most sense in terms
of energy efficiency.’
Roel concluded, ‘So should we be afraid of
the data police? I hope not, but there is a big
challenge in powering Big Data. In particular
ICT vendors need to lighten up and evolve their
outdated “Ford T” operating systems! There
is the potential to create countless tailored
variations to suit each individual or business’ data
needs, tweaked for optimal energy efficiency in
each case. In this way, we can start to ensure
that Big Data storage and consumption is clean,
sustainable and unrestricted.’
IN BRIEF
MainOne has announced that its data
centre subsidiary, MDXi is now an
SAP certified provider of infrastructure
services for SAP solutions. This new
certification confirms the ability of
the company to deliver high quality
cloud and infrastructure operations
services for customers running
SAP solutions and recognises the
company as the region’s first SAP
certified data centre.
ST2, the start-up sustainable
technology company, has
exchanged land in the former ICI
site in Redcar as part of its £100m
development of a new data centre.
The move will lead to the creation of
circa 400 jobs for the area and is a
significant inward investment for the
North East, pending a successful
planning application.
LDeX Group has expanded its
carrier offering with the addition of
wireless Internet service provider
Telcom. Telcom joins over 20 network
providers offered by the carrier neutral
LDeX Group, meaning that customers
now have more choice when selecting
a service. Telcom’s high speed
wireless connection removes the need
for fibre cables: this makes it possible
to connect more buildings to ultra fast
Internet without having to dig up the
streets, which makes installation time
much quicker.
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