Up to 50 Percent Savings Potential on Private Cloud Environments
Frankfurt, February 13, 2023. New Year’s resolutions return every 365 days – often with the later realization that one has set too high goals. Whether as a private individual or as a company: sustainability has been one of the top aspirations for years. The IT industry is considered one of the largest electricity consumers and is therefore particularly aware of its responsibility towards the environment.
Server hardware for new technologies such as blockchain, machine learning, and artificial intelligence is necessarily becoming more powerful, resulting in higher energy consumption in data centers that process these information flows. Therefore, energy-efficient operation is playing an increasingly important role.
“We notice that the topic of sustainability has been in the spotlight for data center operators and users for quite some time now”, says Jerome Evans, founder and CEO of firstcolo GmbH. With the right strategy, large amounts of electricity can be saved, which many German operators are already working on quite successfully.
Greener IT Through Cloud Migration
To further pursue the approach of Green IT, data center operators work around the clock on new solutions and strategies to get closer to this goal step by step. “External data centers solve the problem of a very high demand for additional server and cloud infrastructures for many companies, which they often cannot meet due to a lack of IT resources”, explains Evans. Feeling overwhelmed often leads to sensitive security vulnerabilities, and sustainable aspects are lost.
However, a large number of data centers are often only utilized up to 20 percent – which is frequently due to an orientation towards operational peaks that are rarely reached. “By migrating existing infrastructures, this large gap can be significantly reduced – thus up to 50 percent of the energy used can be saved”, the colocation expert explains. As a result, affected servers run more securely and efficiently and can be scaled much more easily.
Defying Rising Costs
The skyrocketing energy prices, in particular, are ensuring that Green IT and energy efficiency in data centers are playing an increasingly important role. Since the IT infrastructure of industrial companies requires enormous amounts of electricity, this initially results in considerable additional costs. “Conscious economic action in the interest of the company and a comprehensive sustainability strategy do not have to be in contradiction with each other”, Evans points out. “By outsourcing data to a private cloud environment, the energy requirement per server resource used decreases, which allows the effective energy consumption to be greatly reduced through higher efficiency.”
Colocation operators also rely on green and highly efficient hardware. Sensors that measure air changes, cooling systems that save water and electricity, as well as energy-efficient processors – various measures contribute to sustainability in the latest data centers. In conclusion, the expert notes: “Gradually, operators are thus managing to cope with the increasing volume of data while increasingly focusing on aspects of sustainability.”
