Datacenter outages are costing more, $1m+ failures now common Datacenter operators worldwide are largely unprepared for sustainability requirements, despite the industry anticipating new regulations in many regions. Meanwhile, outages are becoming increasingly costly, and progress on energy efficiency is stuck. These findings come from Uptime Institute's 2022 Global Datacenter Survey, …
From what has been drifting around on the grapevine here it appears we may have to set up our own datacentres, so this is defintely something that will go into the mix - I think it's not just essential from an environmental perspective, done well it also saves resources so we can defend that to the bookkeepers too.
As far as I can tell it'll be a lot of IBM Power gear due to virtualisation (at least it's all Unix), no idea what they do regarding sustainability. I do know they come out well regarding reliability, and given the scalability of the gear I don't see us replacing that often either (also helpful in this respect) but these things need power and cooling too. I suspect someone will drop networking of all of that in my lap, so I'm going to have to dig out some specialists soon.
Oh well, I suspect it'll take at least a month for mangelement to make up its mind one way or the other anyway.
I suspect it'll take at least a month for mangelement to make up its mind one way or the other
Maybe they'll listen to the UK Government and realise that we all have until 2050 to get our acts together, by which time the UK will just magically switch to carbon-free power. It'll be fine.
"Mr Flywheel, time to wake up and take your meds"...
Water usage? I would assume for a lot of centers this could be zero -- I mean, my car uses water cooling but the coolant is not shot out onto the ground when it's done cooling the engine. I would have thought most cooling loops would be a loop -- you put the water in once and it recirculates. I would also think data centers that are open are set up so they pull in water, heat it up some, and spit it back out into whatever water source they got it from. Which of course is a concern insofar as if the river or lake level drops, they then have intake pipes stuck up in the air instead of underwater, but would still yield net 0 water usage.
That said -- this is in everyone's best interests all around. I'm waiting with baited breath for ARM desktops and notebooks (besides Apple) to come out so I can enjoy reduced power use at home and better battery life and lower heat production on my notebook (I had a Chromebook with Tegra K1 and it was awesome -- faster than my desktop at the time, I set it to boot into Ubuntu and got 22 hour battery life in Ubuntu -- and still just over 12 hours if I ran the quad-core ARMs full-tilt running video encodes! But it was certainly engineered to spec, the case, power connector, battery, keyboard, and trackpad crapped out within like 2 weeks of each other after about a year and half of use.) Besides environmental reasons, power and cooling are large costs for data centers so anything that reduces these usages reduces their costs as well.
I suspect the use of additives to prevent corrosion and the buildup of sludge in the circulation is what's causing most environmental issues. Fresh water contains quite a lot of oxygen which is nice for fish but not so much for the materials, and ditto for conductivity where interconnecting different materials can also create issues.
Actually an interesting topic, I must do some research and see what solutions are out there. Water cooling *is* more efficient, but the possibly required maintenance overhead and risk may be a limiting factor. If air leaks it's at most annoying, water is a tad more problematic.
Why would they be required to count 'carbon'? I doubt many data centres emit CO2 directly, so the 'carbon' impact is a function of power use and many/most already quote average kW/MW consumption. It's obviously a way of using them to pressure the power suppliers to become 'greener', as if they didn't have enough pressure directly anyway. And it's yet another tick in the ESG box ☹️
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