Increased virtualisation, better cooling systems, smarter network technology and innovative recycling systems for cooling and heating. These are some of the keys to ensuring that data centres' energy consumption no longer needs to increase in line with the amount of data that is created, stored and managed. Binero has chosen to spearhead a whole new generation of data centres and can therefore offer 100 per cent fossil-free data and applications, with one of the lowest energy consumptions in the industry.
Transition to climate-neutral data centres
Digitalisation, and the millions of data centres that power it, are often singled out as energy-guzzling environmental villains. Sometimes rightly so – there are still data centres powered by fossil fuels, which is simply not acceptable in 2021. Studies indicate that data centre workloads have more than sextupled over the past decade, leading to a 6 per cent increase in energy consumption. This trend needs to be reversed and production needs to move towards becoming at least climate neutral, as the world's data centres already accounted for greenhouse gas emissions on a par with the entire aviation industry a few years ago.
It is therefore a question of being able to handle and run more and more data, services and applications, using less and less energy. We see several important keys that will enable this development. First and foremost, reduced energy consumption through larger and more efficient server virtualisation. More energy-efficient port technologies have also enabled a tenfold increase in IP traffic for data centres with only modest increases in energy consumption in network devices. In addition, modern and more efficient cooling systems have enabled a drastic reduction in the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) figure in recent years.
The PUE figure for Bineros' data centre in Vallentuna is estimated to be as low as 1.1 – a level that was considered utopian a few years ago, but which is entirely possible today if climate issues are prioritised right from the start of the data centre's construction.
We have built our data centre with both the climate and users in mind, from the ground up together with our energy partner E.ON and in close collaboration with Vallentuna Municipality. The heat produced in the data centre is sent out into Vallentuna Municipality's district heating network to heat homes, and the cold water that comes back is used to cool the data centre again in a modern cycle. In 2020, we were awarded the global climate certificate Fossil Free Data, which means that we meet strict requirements for being energy efficient, having low carbon dioxide emissions and using 100 per cent renewable electricity.
Shared resources reduce climate footprint
Another equally shining climate hero is the public cloud. In some ways, the cloud can be seen as an energy guzzler, for example in terms of video streaming, which is very resource-intensive. But there is also a clear upside to organisations transitioning from traditional platforms to the cloud. Thanks to the cloud's resource sharing, fewer and fewer servers are running at a fraction of their capacity, as public cloud services can share computing and storage resources in ways that are hundreds of times more energy efficient.
Even if a data centre is running at low capacity, it still requires the servers to be running, which means that they can still consume large amounts of power – especially if they are older models of servers. These types of data centres are often owned by companies that have not yet moved to public SaaS or IaaS clouds – a move that reduces a company's environmental footprint linked to IT services from day one. Organisations that have not yet migrated to public clouds can therefore take major steps towards their environmental goals – especially if they choose a climate-certified cloud provider.
