Gartner: Data Centres Account for 23% of Global ICT CO2 Emissions

November 5, 2007 // Published as a news service by IHS

The Gartner estimate follows its finding in April 2007 that the ICT industry produces 2% of global CO2 emissions, placing it on a par with the aviation industry.

Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner, said, "Although the figure compares favourably with the 40% of emissions from PCs and monitors, it is much more concentrated and rising more quickly. Not enough attention has been paid to reducing the data centre's carbon emissions."

Kumar said organisations should keep their data centre CO2 emissions constant in order to help curb excessive data centre growth and act as a counterbalance to deploying hardware that is not energy efficient.

"Data centres account for such a large portion of ICT CO2 emissions for three main reasons," Kumar said. These reasons, which will affect the cost of running a data centre, are:

• A lack of floor space.
• A failure to house high-density servers.
• Increased power consumption and heat generation.

Most organisations have grown their infrastructure (servers, storage and networks) during the past three years. While the volume growth of these machines is set to rise annually for the next five years, a general lack of new data centre builds during the past seven years means that quality data-centre floor space is limited.

Further, traditional data centres have been built to a facility's design specification, which struggles to house the current (and future) generation of high-density servers. In addition, the type of server being developed will need more power and will generate more heat; therefore, it will need better cooling.

"As a result of these dynamics, we predict that energy management will become a significant issue in procuring new hardware and running data centres," Kumar said.

To reverse the situation, Kumar offers five guidelines to chief information officers (CIOs) and data centre leaders on power management:

• Align the IT organisation with corporate facilities groups. Understand the working practices, documented guidelines and corporate policies of corporate facilities groups. This will help to establish what is appropriate for specific problems, such as cooling.
• Baseline current energy use and costs, and model future increases. Establish financial models for gaining a granular picture of energy costs to understand where power goes (servers, cooling, UPS or power distribution) and how much it costs.
• Establish a sustainable IT expert group. From an IT perspective, a small team (or, initially, an individual) needs to take ownership of the IT-related environmental issues and establish rules of engagement for making decisions, such as server selection or data centre design.
• Evaluate future technologies. These will include facilities-type solutions and energy software management tools for the office environment.
• Develop a green procurement programme. Get started on green IT procurement by adopting the environmental requirements set out by long-established, government-backed environmental labeling bodies.

Source: Gartner Inc.