Data centres 550%
The growth of data centre demand in the past eight years, while the energy needed to power those data centres only grew by 6%.
Google
Consequently, the world’s data centres are becoming much larger. Hyperscale data centres – defined as those with more than 5,000 servers and occupying more than 10,000 ft2
– are quickly
becoming the norm rather than the exception. It seems safe to assume, therefore, that as more server racks handle more data traffic, we can expect a significant hike in power consumption – in turn leading to an unwelcome rise in carbon emissions. Making assumptions, however, can often be unwise.
If we look back just ten years, estimates suggested that the world’s data centres barely caused a blip on the graph of global power consumption. Since then, extrapolating their energy demands in line with the growth in the world’s data centre estate has led some to draw worrying conclusions, with one study suggesting that more than 3% of all the world’s power demand comes from internet- enabled devices and data centres. That translates to 2% of global greenhouse emissions.
“While we do our best to avoid growing the footprint of our data centres, we continue to invest to maintain best-in-class standards.”
Ian Haynes
Such conclusions have, however, been refuted by no less an expert than the IEA itself, which observes that while energy use from data centres did grow rapidly in the early 2000s, they still currently consume just 1% of the world’s power – or around 200TWh of electricity annually. To put that in context, the UK as a whole consumes just over 300TWh each year.
40%
“Carbon emissions from data centres globally are probably decreasing, since data centre electricity use has been flat while the overall electricity grid is decarbonising,” says George Kamiya, an emerging technologies analyst at the IEA. “Over the past several years, tech companies have also been buying a lot of renewable energy through power purchase agreements [PPAs]. But there is certainly more they can do to fully decarbonise their operations and supply chains.”
The surge of global internet traffic between February and mid-April 2020, driven by growth in video streaming, video conferencing, online gaming and social networking.
International Energy Agency 20
For banks, which are heavy users of data centres – either owning and operating their own server farms or choosing to hand the reins to cloud servicers – being a part of this positive trend remains a key factor in their decision-making process. HSBC, which not only has its own large data centre estate – but also works closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) – proves this point neatly. “We consider our cloud journey to be ongoing and we will continue to migrate data and workloads to cloud when it makes financial and business sense
to do so,” says Ian Haynes, HSBC’s head of global cloud services. “While we will do our best to avoid growing the footprint of our data centres, we continue to invest to maintain the best-in-class standards for security, resilience and sustainability that our business demands.”
Cool it
HSBC has made a Global Carbon Net Zero pledge and is focusing on achieving the highest standards of power usage effectiveness (PUE), which alongside data centre infrastructure efficiency (DCIE) is a widely accepted benchmarking standard for monitoring the impact of energy efficiency practices.
“Energy efficiency and sustainability are hugely important for HSBC,” Haynes emphasises. “In 2020, we achieved our stated aim of reducing PUE to below 1.5, from our 2011 baseline of 1.9. A PUE of 1.5 means that for every $1 spent on powering hardware, $0.50 is spent on cooling and ancillary infrastructure. A PUE of below 1.6 would be considered best-in-class.”
The efforts banks are making to control energy consumption and, consequently, to reduce carbon emissions, are part of a broader global effort by large technology companies and providers of cloud services – not least Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which between them own and operate a large proportion of the world’s hyperscale data centres. A 2020 study authored by, among others, Eric Masanet, professor of engineering at Northwestern University, shows that data-intensive technologies, including artificial intelligence, are driving the rapid increase in demand for capacity in the data centres – the information backbone of a digitalised world. It also shows, however, that energy consumption does not rise in direct proportion to data centres’ capacity. Masanet’s analysis shows that while data centre demand has grown 550% in the past eight years, the energy needed to power those data centres only grew 6%. The underlying reason is the effectiveness of energy efficiency initiatives undertaken by data centre operators. “Concerns about the rapid growth in energy use and emissions stem from a few misconceptions,” explains Kamiya. “Firstly, the idea that the internet must have a large energy and carbon footprint because of its importance in our daily lives and the overall economy. In reality, data centres account for about 1% of global electricity use, and an even smaller share of greenhouse gas emissions. “Secondly, some might think that because internet traffic is growing, its energy use and emissions must also be growing. This is not how most internet infrastructure works, and energy efficiency in data centres and data transmission is improving rapidly.”
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
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