Data Centres
Making data centres leaner and greener
In the midst of digital transformation, banks are looking for more from their data centre partners. They want speed, affordability, security and guaranteed performance levels, but must also focus on how their data infrastructure impacts the environment. Konstantin Hartmann, VP sales and commercial at NTT Global Data Centers, explains how sustainability is a core part of the company’s offering.
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ustainability is no longer an add-on. It is not a peripheral issue – and has moved to the heart of strategy in the financial services industry. At a time when banks are putting more and more data into the private and public cloud, when their demand for compute capacity is growing exponentially, emissions reduction and energy efficiency are fundamental considerations. “The industry is partly forced to look at sustainability because of the demands of regulators,” says Konstantin Hartmann, VP sales and commercial at NTT GDC. “The financial services sector is a big user of colocation and cloud services, and it has a lot of challenges around security, data privacy and latency, which is why banks maintain some on-premise data centre capability, but our clients tell us that they have to look at sustainability too.”
“The servers for their private cloud – the data centre element of their IT infrastructure – are often in their own ageing and inefficient facilities.” Hartmann continues. “When sustainability issues come into play, they can look at what we are doing and see that we are building more state-of-the- art data centres with colocation capability that offer the best opportunity to reduce energy consumption and cost, while constantly looking to invest in improving our performance.” It is clear that NTT – the third-largest data centre business on earth – takes sustainability very seriously. It has signed up to the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, for instance, which pledges
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to leverage technology and digitalisation to achieve the goal of making Europe climate neutral by 2050.
“That is part of the transition to a greener future, and we are shaping the regulatory framework for data centres,” Hartmann explains. “We are ahead of schedule in the UK. Our London 1 Data Center in Dagenham, for example, has been built with a secure and sustainable world in mind. We looked at the critical cooling part and saw that compressors and refrigerants contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, so we have left them out.”
“The result is a lower power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio, which means less power which means lower emissions,” he adds. “We purchase 100% renewable energy for all our UK data centres.”
Sustainability at scale The London 1 Data Center in Dagenham adds to NTT’s UK assets, which include sites in Slough and Hemel Hempstead, and has been designed with key features, such as generator backup and highly redundant cooling systems. “We are proud to be part of the East London regeneration programme and the site has a really strong fibre corridor, so there is all of the low latency that banks require, but we also have the cooling systems and renewable energy that help them to meet their sustainability goals,” says Hartmann. “All of our data centres are built with evolving sustainability standards and targets in mind, and we are looking to the future in other ways,” he adds. “We are working on the energy consumption
of computers, too. Running the cloud requires lots of hot boxes, so we are trying to cut back on the amount of energy that compute power uses.” One example is the work of NTT’s R&D team in Japan, which is developing an all- photonic electricity network technology to improve network performance with lower power consumption, better network capacity, and less delay. “Every RFP is more about sustainability now,” Hartmann notes. “Many industries are going through digital transformation and banking is no exception. Time is now of the essence when it comes to moving forward. “But banks are no longer investing in next generation infrastructure,” he adds. “This is because it doesn’t make sense when there are specialist providers who are looking at the latest innovation including sustainable solutions. It is increasingly important that banks look at carbon footprint – a lot of which comes from on-premise data centres.” Banks are big users of compute
power, so colocation providers like NTT are always looking to innovate and raise the bar, whether it is reusing the heat from its buildings to benefit the local community or finding new ways to cool a data centre. “We have a many-layered approach to sustainability and compute efficiency,” says Hartmann. “A bank will not likely be thinking about that on a day-to-day basis. We house a lot of the cloud and compute in the world, so we are optimising for huge clients every day, including some of the biggest companies in the world.”
Jackie Niam/Shutterstock
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