IT experts share their advice on using technology to cut carbon emissions

Enterprises need more capabilities, more data storage, more applications, and more functionality to grow. Yet they are also under pressure from customers and regulators to reduce carbon emissions and meet new environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals to store their data as sustainably and efficiently as possible.

What steps can enterprises take to use modern technologies to reduce the carbon emissions of their infrastructure, and specifically, their data centres?

That’s the question we posed recently to members of the Foundry Influencer Network, a community of industry analysts, IT professionals, and journalists, to find out how they were reducing the carbon footprints of their data centres and moving toward sustainable digital infrastructure.

Technology integration specialist, Steve Prentice (@cloudtweaksteve) said: “Since much of a data centre's carbon emissions come from the need for cooling as well as the need for actual computing, companies should focus on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar to generate the power needed.”

Meanwhile, Frank Cutitta (@fcutitta), CEO and founder of HealthTech Decisions Lab, also believes that reducing the inefficiency of the data centre should be at the heart of an organisation’s sustainability initiative.

He said: “When one looks at the energy that can be consumed by just a single Google search, one realises that data centres can be as guilty as traditional auto manufacturers in contributing to climate change. One report stated that a data centre powering a search on the term “Jurassic Park” can use as much energy per year as 20,000 homes.”

For Gene de Libero (@GeneDeLibero), chief strategy officer of GeekHive.com, enterprises can reduce emissions significantly through the use of virtualisation and decommissioning unneeded infrastructure.

“The simple stuff is where we start. First, we focus on virtualisation wherever possible. Another strategy to immediately reduce electricity use and cost while reducing clients’ carbon footprint is to hunt down and decommission zombie servers. Depending on your study of choice, millions of zombie servers are out there guzzling resources and impeding green data centre efforts,” he said.

The importance of reducing inefficient and outdated hardware is something that Richard J.Streitz, COO of Ruh Global Impact agrees with. But he thinks it can be a costly process.

Streitz said: “Replacing old, outdated hardware for new more energy efficient systems, can be one easy way to significantly reduce carbon footprint. This may require large upfront capital expenses, but in the long view is not only better for the planet (and all of us) but demonstrates that the organisation takes very seriously their corporate social responsibility initiatives by not being afraid to invest into reducing their carbon footprint.”

For Scott Schober (@ScottBVS), president and CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems, the journey toward reducing his organisation’s carbon footprint began with conducting an efficiency analysis and contacting the energy provider.

“We contacted our energy provider and learned that we can select the method of energy creation that is delivered to our facility. So, we opted to migrate to green energy creation even though we pay a slightly higher price” said Schober.

He continued: “As I understand it, the more companies and families that choose this kind of energy option, the lower the price of entry will become for future adopters since the economies of scale will kick into a growing energy source that is not dictated by supply and demand of finite fossil fuels.”

This process of green self-discovery is something Amélie Koran (@webjedi), non-resident senior fellow Atlantic Council, believes many organisations are undergoing.

She said: “Right now, I believe many organisations are looking towards figuring out where their energy and environmental impacts are. This is either via a board action or request, or via the fact that maintaining non-efficient operations require[s] new thinking and new ways of doing business.”

Of course, when such initiatives rely on executive buy-in, Isaac Sacolick (@nyike), president of StarCIO and author of Digital Trailblazer, notes that it can be challenging to move forward.

He said: “A difficult issue facing enterprise IT infrastructure leaders is requesting buy-in from business unit executives to schedule upgrades of legacy apps running on less efficient and often end-of-life hardware.”

The only way forward is for organisations not to expect immediate returns.

“It is even harder to shut down small legacy data centres and consolidate them to more energy-efficient public or private clouds. Both situations require business to allocate app development and testing resources and schedule downtime to support the migration, sometimes without direct short-term business benefits,” Sacolick said.

According to Martez Reed (@GreenReedTech), director of technical marketing at Morpheus Data, organisations can answer these challenges by investing in converged or hyperconverged infrastructure that offer to increase overall operational efficiency.

He said: “Enterprises are continuing to adopt composable and converged infrastructure as a means to gain operational efficiency but the reduction in the overall hardware footprint helps reduce carbon emissions.”

CIO Jason James (@itlinchpin) believes that combining hyperconverged hardware with virtualisation can greatly reduce the number of physical servers needed to function.

“Add hyperconverged hardware and the number of servers, storage, and switches can be even further reduced. Much of the challenge now lies ahead for hardware manufacturers to further reduce heat and power consumption to reduce carbon emissions. At the same time, data centres must look for more renewable energy sources to power and cool their facilities,” James said.

Above all, Arsalan Khan (@ArsalanAKhan), a speaker, advisor, and blogger, believes that organisational alignment is the key to moving forward with green initiatives.

“At the people level, we look at change management, training, and adoption issues. To face challenges, we have to consider the organisation-wide mentality towards going green and how we can make it easy for new projects to adopt available green technologies in the data centres that readily have access to enterprise data,” Khan said. If you want to learn more, download the "Improving Sustainability in Data Centers" report.