Report: Data Centers Fast Growing Contributors to Global Warming

Digital processing is on the rise today. From online banking to auctions, orders in shopping carts, Web searches and videos that are uploaded and streamed, and these rising demands require large-scale computing facilities, or data centers to process. According to the latest research study conducted by McKinsey & Company with Uptime Institute, these data centers are not only the fast growing contributors to Global warming, but are also a drain on corporate profitability.

The Uptime Institute is an independent research, corporate advisory, knowledge exchange, education and professional services provider serving the owners and operators of enterprise data centers with expertise in uptime availability, reliability, and resiliency in enterprise computing within formal critical computing environments like computer rooms, server farms and ranches, and data centers.

 

McKinsey is a management consulting firm advising leading companies on strategy, organization, technology, and operations.

 

The report “Revolutionizing Data Center Energy Efficiency—Key Analyses,” is a result of a year long study by McKinsey & Company and Uptime Institute. Looking into the effects of power hungry data centers, the report calls for an immediate overhaul of corporate management practices and a doubling of energy efficiency in large-scale corporate computing facilities by 2012.

 

According to the report, an average data center consumes power that can be used by 25,000 American homes. And the energy consumption in data centers is almost .5 percent of world production. At this rate, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions will increase four folds by the year 2020.

 

“While the design of the next generation of ‘green’ data centers gets a lot of attention and is certainly a worthwhile pursuit, we’re putting forward the case in this report that improving efficiency in existing sites will lower energy usage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions faster and more significantly with less cost,” said Kenneth G. Brill, founder and executive director of Uptime Institute.

 

The report recommends a three point plan that could help corporations double the energy efficiency of data- and network-center computing and was made available to corporate executives, engineers and scientists around the globe and to representatives of the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program at the Institute’s annual research symposium Green Enterprise Computing.

 

The recommendations mandate inclusion of true total cost of ownership, including data center facilities, in the business-case justification of new products and applications to throttle excess demand as well as the need to rapidly mature and integrate asset management capabilities to reach the same par as security function and formally move accountability for data center critical facilities expense and operations to the CIO and  to appoint an internal "Energy Czar" with an operations and technology mandate to double IT energy efficiency by 2012.

 

To achieve the recommended doubling of energy efficiency, McKinsey and Uptime suggest that equipment manufacturers and industry groups establish uniform metrics, along the lines of the metrics used for automobile fuel consumption, which will measure the individual and combined energy efficiency of corporate, public-sector- and third-party-hosted data centers.