Sustainable Data Centers for IT leaders

The internet giants are committed to be more sustainable. The american GAFAM and chinese BATX have a corporate social responsibility about their energy consumption. The most visible envionmental effects of IT sector is the power consumption of its data centers.

Minimize the impact of energy

The key to Green IT is to use renewable energy. They are clean energy and efficient-energy. Datas centers consume gigantic quantity of Energy. The goal is to reduce greenhouse gas footprint. The energy footprint in the IT consumes 7% of global electricity. IT giants build sustainable datas centers to have a positive impact on the world.

 

Renewable energy and power efficient

The GAFAMS and the BATX are committed to using more clean energy. Facebook was the first to commit ion 2011 to use 100% renewable Energy by 2020. The IT giants build Energy-efficient datas centers.

• Free cooling : use the outside temperature to cool down the servers. The infrastructure is built in a cold region. Facebook has a data center in Sweden. Google in Finland. Alibaba has a data center in the Zhangbei region of China with -38 degrees in winter.
• Wind and solar : Wind tower and solar Energy to cool down the server. Fcaebook uses these techniques
• Water cooling : immerse the servers in water to cool down them. Alibaba uses this technique in its Qiandao Lake data center
• Ocean and oil : Microsoft has the submarine immersion project of data centers in Ireland. There are also immersion projects in oil.
• Artificial intelligence : Google uses AI DeepMind to manage the cooling of its data centers. The result is 12 to 30% more energy saved.

 

Energy transparency

Greenpeace evaluates each year the energy consumption of GAFAM and BATX in its Clicking clean 2017 Report. The NGO notes very well the American GAFAMS. They use a lot of renewable energy. Little coal power. They are very transparent. They get a rating of "A" or "B". With the exception of Amazon which only gets a "C" because it uses too little renewable energy and lack of transparency.

Facebook and Apple lead the sector of Energy transparency. They provide annual report of their energy footprint energy centers. Greenpeace scores them to "A". Facebook allows everyone to watch real time performance performance of its data centers. The link to watch Facebook Data centers.

Chineses BATX are very poorly rated : between "D" and "F". They still use too much coals power, and are totally lacking in transparency. Alibaba has made a lot of progress, but is still lagging behind GAFAMS. BATX still have a lot of progress to make.

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://blog.economie-numerique.net/2019/05/09/sustainable-data-centers-for-it-leaders/

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