Up until recently scientists thought that the levels of green house gasses would in line with the world’s economy. Latest figures show however, that over the last several years concentrations of greenhouse gases have grown 35% faster.
With the trend towards high-density, high-power consumption equipment such as blade servers makes the cost of housing, powering and cooling of even the most modest of datacenter’s more relevant than ever. Not only does this impact the bottom line in terms of power costs, it also creates a larger carbon footprint for your organisation. Indeed Gartner recently reported that the world’s data centres are responsible for the same volume of carbon emissions as the average European country. It is estimated that only half of the electricity consumed in a typical computing environment is actually used by the servers, with 25% going to cooling, 12% to air conditioning and 13% to electricity transformation and lighting. It is ironic then that most servers typically run at only 5-10% of their resource utilization.
Google is probably has the most ambitious global warming action plan on Earth. Fortunately, it has the budget too. Google has long indicated a commitment to addressing climate change, from both the Foundation perspective and from the standpoint of business operations. Google currently partially powers their huge data centres with solar power, installing 1.6 megawatts of solar photovoltaic panels at their headquarters in Mountain View. in the United States. The search engine not only invests in renewable energy and greener technologies, it has made a commitment to reducing its behemoth carbon footprint to zero.
Ratification of the Kyoto Protocol means that limiting greenhouse gas emissions will eventually become part of most organisations’ regulatory compliance initiatives, and IT as a major power consumer will be a prime target for compliance. So how can smaller organisations help reduce carbon emissions from IT?
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