What Data Centers Can Teach the World about Earth Day
With the annual hype of Earth Day accelerated by the big 40th anniversary, it's high time to look at how data centers have gotten far ahead of the rest of the enterprise when it comes to going green. Read More
Tomorrow is Earth Day, and the 250+ Earth Day-themed emails in my inbox attest to the fact that companies of all types, in all industries, and of all sizes are trying to cash in on the heightened awareness of April 22, 2010 — which marks the 40th anniversary of environmentalism’s Big Day.
But I just came across a post on Data Center Journal that maps interesting new territory for Earth Day coverage. In “Earth Day: A Day for Data Centers to Celebrate,” Jeff Clark writes:
Today, Earth Day remains a day marking many people’s and organizations’ concern for the environment.
Although data centers do not by themselves produce noxious emissions or wastes that are dumped into landfills or water supplies, they are power-hungry operations that require an ever-increasing amount of the world’s energy supply. […] Running a server doesn’t produce pollution or waste, but generating the electricity to run that server (not to mention keep it cool) often produces waste — whether radioactive by-products from a nuclear reactor or emissions from the burning of coal or natural gas. In addition, these energy sources (radioactive materials and fossil fuels) must be mined, leading to various potential environmental hazards. […]
Thus, Earth Day is a reminder to data centers, as much as other industries, of the effects of their operation on the quality of the air, water, and land on which both humans and other species live.
What struck me about this essay was its very simplicity, the fact that it takes as its starting point the idea that IT professionals don’t care about the environment, and haven’t done much of anything to reduce their environmental impact.
Whether that’s true or not isn’t my place to say (my beat, and our audience, is self-selecting for a heightened interest in all things green, to say the least). But Clark’s post highlights for me that green IT has made its significant inroads, and achieved its notable successes, without requiring that the IT industry care about — or even know about — green issues.
I read Data Center Journal every day, and it’s often a reliable source for green IT news — even though green IT per se is rarely mentioned on the site. Instead, all the things that DCJ writes about every day — energy efficiency, virtualization, HVAC efficiency — are all core green IT practices.
And Clark says as much, to boot:
Concurrent with the recent economic downturn, many data centers have reduced their energy demands for cooling by simply increasing their operating temperatures and by relying more on outside air in place of cooled air. The timing of this trend may indicate more of a financial motivation than an environmental one, but these two objectives are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
What it boils down to is that you can, and should, go green because of the economic benefits, rather than the environmental benefits. Now, compare this “Green 1.0,” wake-up-call kind of story with the actual progress made in the last five years for data center efficiency.
As we reported yesterday, the world’s first LEED-certified green data center opened its doors five years ago, and over the course of that time has saved $1.7 million in energy costs for Fannie Mae, and cut 23 million gallons of water use.
Nowadays, a LEED-certified data center hardly turns heads. (We’ve got nearly 100 news stories on LEED-certified data centers on GreenBiz.com alone.) But check out the intro to this article from TechTarget announcing the opening of Fannie Mae’s LEED data center, back in 2005:
IT doesn’t do “green.” Hardware refresh cycles are constantly shrinking, sending tons of server flotsam into the waste stream. Equipment is packed so densely that companies are requiring hundreds of watts per square foot in their facilities.
In fact, the requirements of IT departments have been so far opposite the sustainable design movement that the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a nonprofit organization that promotes and certifies environmentally friendly buildings, has so far opted not to address data center facilities at all.
How things have changed in just five years. Data centers are regularly reporting their energy efficiency, as measured by PUE, tech companies and NGOs are going head-to-head over where their power comes from, and companies are finding that virtualization means physical expansion — and those “tons of server flotsam” — can be a thing of the past.
{related_content}With the 40th anniversary of Earth Day almost upon us, it seems to me that the IT industry — or at least data center owners, operators and OEMs — have achieved the opposite of the business world at large. Data centers are far along on the path to a widespread, comprehensive “greening,” while barely pausing to pat themselves on the back.
Compare that with the hundreds and hundreds of emails I’ve gotten from companies touting their environmental initiatives in the last six weeks, all in the hopes of landing a spot in someone’s Earth Day news coverage.
If only the rest of the business world could learn from IT’s example.
