Data centers are always at the forefront of developing innovative ways to improve energy efficiency and promote sustainability with renewable energy in procurement strategies. Even so, power consumption in data centers will continue to grow in order to meet demands for digital infrastructure.
Racing to meet the demand often seems to contradict data centers and their push for sustainability, but digital solutions offer a viable path forward. And those pursuing digital solutions are enjoying important benefits, as demonstrated by the World Economic Forum, which found that enterprises prioritizing digitalization saw a 70% improvement in productivity, compared to only 30% for companies slower to adopt digital solutions.
With digitalization, data centers can improve productivity while moving forward with sustainability goals. There are four critical areas that require focus: energy consumption, reducing energy costs, improving productivity, and protecting reliability.
Energy Consumption: Every data center has an ever-present goal of reducing energy consumption while upholding high standards for reliability. Now, digitalization of energy management paired with automation forms a complementary goal for improving visibility and control over how energy is consumed in the data center. A central dashboard allows for the quick identification of adjustments that can be made to improve consumption.
Cost Reduction: Most organizations find that energy is a significant part of their costs, and this is particularly true when it comes to data centers. A typical data center may allocate more than 40% of its operating costs to be paid in the area of energy. In response to this challenge, companies are pursuing decentralized, decarbonized, and digitized solutions.
Productivity Improvement: In 2017, the per net rentable square foot in a data center had a cost of $1,305. Improving space utilization can be achieved through digital transformation focused on increasing rack density. New tools are available to manage the complexity of rack density concerns, and some data centers that have pursued digital solutions have seen an improvement of between 35% and 60%.
Reliability: Data centers are always focused on maintaining uptime, as well as avoiding any unplanned downtime. A survey by Uptime Institute showed that there are increases being seen in areas of both frequency and cost of an outage. Approximately half of those that participated in the study reported an incident cost of more than $100,000. But those organizations that have embraced digital solutions have decreased downtime by using enhanced visibility and predictive maintenance to apply precision cooling and relieve overloaded servers. Preparing data centers for sustainability begins by partnering with a guide that can help you identify the right priorities for your organization and then leverage the best technology. Contact us at eXemplify where we work with companies like yours to improve data center energy consumption to meet your goals.