How do data centers impact the environment?

Compared to many other businesses and industries, data centers are relatively clean. However, every business directly and indirectly effects the environment, and the data center industry is working to develop and standardize a wide number of solutions and practices that will make data centers more environmentally efficient now and into the future (see “What are data centers and the IT industry doing to reduce their environmental impact?”).

The two issues that the data center industry is most focused on improving are energy consumption and waste.

Data centers require electricity to run and cool their computing and networking infrastructures. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that U.S. data centers consumed 61-million megawatt hours in 2006 (1.5% of total U.S. electricity consumption), twice as much as in 2000. Data center energy consumption is growing as companies and end users require more performance, applications, and access; as newer technologies (such as faster CPUs and larger hard drives) require more power; and as hardware and service prices continue falling, generating greater data center demand.

The production of the technology used in a data center includes a variety of metals and plastics that have to be disposed of following production or at the end of a product’s lifecycle. Each piece of equipment has a different degree of recyclability, while some cannot be recycled at all.

 
EPA figures suggest that electronics production and disposal amounts to approximately 2% of municipal solid waste. Improving the recyclability of all material related to IT is critical to reducing the environmental impact of data centers.

How “green” are the data center and IT industries?

“Going green” is a relatively new initiative inside the entire IT industry, which itself is very young. Microsoft®, one of the industry’s most veteran players, says it’s “still in the first inning” of going green, according to Rob Bernard, the company’s Chief Environmental Strategist.

But even in these early years of the industry’s maturation, a strong commitment to environmental responsibility is emerging to play a central role in IT growth and development. According to IDC surveys, 80% of IT executives say that environmental responsibility is growing in importance for their organization.
And more than 150 of the industry’s biggest players, including Cisco™, Dell®, Hewlett- Packard, IBM®, Intel®, and Microsoft formed The Green Grid™ consortium for developing metrics, standards, and practices for improving the efficiency of data centers.
 

From manufacturers to enterprises and governmental organizations, many steps are being taken throughout the industry to minimize IT’s environmental impact. Most of these solutions focus on improving energy efficiency and reducing the use and improper disposal of hazardous materials associated with the production of IT equipment.

Enterprises are replacing servers and cooling systems with newer, more energy efficient models. In recent years, processor manufacturers such as AMD and Intel have focused on increasing their chips’ performance per watt, not just their raw processing power. The EPA’s Energy Star program will release a system for rating server power efficiency later this year.

Technology manufacturers have also begun eliminating potentially hazardous materials from the production process.
They and retailers have created recycling programs to safely dispose of products at their end of life (13 U.S. states require and regulate the recycling of hazardous IT materials). Third party recyclers have emerged as well, with companies like Recellular and Electronic Recyclers International creating a market out of recycling IT waste.

What else can the data center industry do to reduce its environmental impact?

Perhaps one of the most difficult challenges data centers face is how to maintain efficiency while also maximizing scalability. Many procure servers that offer the most expandability (with the most expansion slots, RAM slots and hard drive bays).
These servers include a power supply large enough to feed the components that may be installed in the future, but bigger than the server’s present use warrants. Server power supplies are most efficient when running at 80-90% load, so until these servers are expanded they operate at a much lower rate, generating more heat and wasting more power. Multiplied over an entire data center, this can lead to a 20% loss in efficiency.

The alternative approach to scalability is to buy smaller servers that provide immediate efficiency and then scaling by adding more units. This strategy, however, is not more efficient in the long run. Adding more distinct systems requires more racks to house smaller servers, additional disks, more space and power over time, increased obsolescence of components, and more lost efficiency.

The scalability solution is not yet clear. As the data center industry continues to mature, concerted efforts should be made to create models and best practices that optimize scalability and energy efficiency.

What is INTERNATIONAL BANK INFORMATION environmental impact philosophy?

INTERNATIONAL BANK INFORMATION believes that minimizing our environmental impact is essential-not just for being responsible corporate citizens but for providing our customers the best on-demand data center solutions available. Environmental efficiency is integral to our business model and our success. Practices such as maximizing energy efficiency allows INTERNATIONAL BANK INFORMATION to keep operational costs (and prices in turn) as low as possible.
And minimizing our environmental impact provides our customers the opportunity to improve their environmental footprint too, as they replace inefficient internal operations with our optimized solutions.

Most important, we know our efforts must be ongoing. We hope to provide industry leadership in this arena as we have in many others. As soon as one set of ideas, whether from us or others, become best practices, we must pioneer the next round of improvements. And bring those new ideas and practices forward so all can benefit.

How does INTERNATIONAL BANK INFORMATION minimize environmental impact?

INTERNATIONAL BANK INFORMATION maintains a number of practices and programs that keep our and our customers’ environmental footprints as small as possible.
   
We focus on energy efficient practices throughout our data center facilities, including utilizing hot-aisle cold-aisle configurations, blanking panels, and 208v power to the server.
 
We source the most energy efficient components for power supplies, hard drives, and CPUs.

We maintain a company-wide recycling program to reduce materials waste as much as possible. In partnership with Metro Foam Recycling, we recycled more than six tons of server shipment packing foam in 2009.

We have collaborated with Super Micro® to create a reduced packaging material program that decreases the amount of packaging used to ship servers to INTERNATIONAL BANK INFORMATION and eliminates the production of unnecessary components and user guides.

We optimize scalability and energy efficiency by providing customers the opportunity to move from lower-performance, energy-optimized servers to higher-performance, energy-optimized systems when they wish to scale up.

We engineer our hardware solutions to extend product lifecycles, such as standard server chassis that allow components to be utilized across multiple servers, reducing the production and shipment of new and replacement components.

What is the environmental benefit of INTERNATIONAL BANK INFORMATION reduced server packaging program?

It eliminates more than 8 pounds of packing material per server, as well as the shipment of user manuals and unnecessary components, thereby greatly reducing the volume of materials produced or recycled. Moreover, these measures reduce the total shipping “footprint,” enabling the same sized shipping containers to carry more units and reducing the amount of fuel consumed and carbon emissions produced when shipping.