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Experts warn ‘archaic’ practices are hampering green IT efforts
October 25, 2012
Experts warn ‘archaic’ practices are hampering green IT efforts
According to a major new industry-backed report, businesses are wasting billions of pounds every year by cooling their datacenters far more than is necessary due to an ‘archaic’ view of the environmental tolerance of modern equipment.
The Green Grid group released “Data Centre Efficiency & IT Equipment Reliability”, a report that indicates that datacenters can run at significantly higher temperatures and humidity levels than the current norm “without affecting overall equipment failure rates”, potentially delivering huge savings in terms of energy bills and carbon emissions.
“The common perception of IT network, server and storage equipment is that it operates within very tight environment tolerances, but this is a belief based on datacenter practices from the 1950s,” said Harkeeret Singh, contributor to the report. The report concludes that based on historical data, “datacenters can achieve operation cost savings without substantially affecting IT reliability or service availability by adopting a suitable environmental control regime that mitigates the effect of short-duration operation at higher temperatures.”
According to some estimates, datacenters account for one to three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with cooling one of the most energy-demanding aspects of typical server farm infrastructure.
Read more at BusinessGreen.
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