Sustainability in data centers can be improved: “Not bigger and faster, but smarter and more efficient”

“Servers in data centers waste a lot of energy unnecessarily. Many servers run at top capacity day and night without taking data traffic into account. That is comparable to parking your car and leaving the engine on with a brick on the accelerator." Dirk Harryvan van Certios doesn't mince words. As far as he is concerned, the ICT sector is too 'conservative' and energy consumption can be drastically reduced by using ICT applications more intelligently. The PhD physicist and ICT specialist gives his vision on making data centers more sustainable the plenary final lecture at the IT Infra & Telecom Infra event on December 1 in Congrescentrum 1931 in Den Bosch.

“In the 1990s, when I first ended up on the help desk of an IT company as a physicist, sustainability was still in its infancy. Servers were all together in one large room where enormous air conditioners cooled the equipment. This is extremely inefficient because the air mixes from all sides. As computers became faster and transported more data, more and more heat was produced. The air conditioners could not handle the increased heat and it became clear that a different cooling solution was needed. From my physics background, I understood how cooling works. So I started releasing energy at locations by organizing the space more conveniently. For example, it is much more efficient to arrange servers in rows with space in between. In this way, the air flows are all pushed in the same direction to a central location where the cooling machines are located. This saves costs because less energy is needed to dissipate the heat,” says Harryvan.

Waste of energy
“Enormous progress has been made since then in the field of data center cooling, but there is still much to be gained in the ICT field,” says Harryvan. “Many servers only use a small part of their capacity, while using almost 100% of energy. This is the height of waste. It is technically easy to measure how much energy a device uses at a certain time. By making this clear, you can fine-tune the server. It is of course nonsense to run a server at full capacity at night, when there is hardly any data traffic.”

Sky-high energy prices
Data centers and IT administrators know this, according to Harryvan, but do not want to change their policy because they do not experience any pain from the high energy bill. Data centers pass on energy to their customers and companies pay the energy bill from general funds. “The incentive to change is missing,” Harryvan explains. “Companies are used to a certain working method and do not feel like making changes if they do not believe it is necessary. But with the current sky-high energy prices, the customer will of course notice the price difference. And if customers start complaining and threaten to switch, the data centers will have to take action. There is also a legal obligation to become more sustainable through tightened environmental legislation. In short: the time is ripe for greening.”

It starts with insight
Harryvan continues: “The ICT technologies to... efficiency there is room for improvement. This not only saves you on energy costs, but also on hardware. We currently have more than one million servers in the Netherlands and that is a conservative estimate. A large part is taxed less than 20%! Everyone understands that this can and should be improved. Unfortunately, the attention is for efficiency  still sparingly. An incredible amount is possible, but we have to do it. Industry conservatism and economic arguments are hindering progress.”

With the latter, Harryvan refers to the personal consequences of sustainability. “People are still more expensive than devices. Passing on energy costs to the user is easier and cheaper in the short term than hiring an IT specialist to manage the energy costs server idle coefficient the reasoning goes. During my presentation at the IT Infra & Telecom Infra event, I want to use statistics to demonstrate what sustainability delivers in the long term, also in financial terms. Ultimately, one heavily loaded server is more beneficial than a lot of lightly loaded servers that run at full speed day and night. Contrary to what many people think, a website does not become slower if a server is loaded more heavily. That is a widespread misunderstanding. It starts with insight. There is so much possible technologically, but people's behavior must change. And that is only possible if there is a change in mentality.”

Harryvan wants to convince his audience with facts and figures about the ICT side of data centers. “I believe in data: it is important that you know what you need and when. Not thinking bigger and faster, but smarter and more efficient.”

Want to visit a presentation?

Would you like to know more about 'greening' data centers? Register for the presentation and event free of charge via: https://fhi.nl/itinfra.