If your organization is searching for to enhance the sustainability of its knowledge heart, one possibility is to put money into cutting-edge cooling and water administration applied sciences.
Right here’s an alternative choice – one that’s more likely to be a lot easier, sooner and cheaper: migrating to a colocation facility, which suggests an information heart that’s shared by a number of companies. Total, colocation knowledge facilities have a tendency to supply sustainability alternatives which are tougher to attain inside non-public knowledge facilities.
What Can Make Colocation Knowledge Facilities Extra Sustainable?
In comparison with a non-public knowledge heart – that means one owned and utilized by only one firm – colocation services provide a number of sustainability benefits:
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Scale: As a result of a number of companies share area inside colocation knowledge facilities, these services are typically bigger in measurement. This results in efficiencies of scale that may increase sustainability. For instance, it’s usually extra energy-efficient to chill 100 thousand servers sitting inside one knowledge heart than it’s to chill the identical whole variety of servers unfold throughout 100 totally different, smaller knowledge facilities.
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Extra sustainable applied sciences: Colocation gives companies a approach to profit from sustainability options – like immersion cooling or renewable vitality sources – that they might discover too costly or advanced to put in in their very own knowledge facilities.
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Environment friendly utilization: Companies that use a colocation knowledge heart to host servers can sometimes scale the quantity of area they hire up or down rapidly. From a sustainability perspective, that is helpful as a result of it reduces the quantity of knowledge heart area that sits unutilized, which in flip signifies that the carbon invested in constructing and working knowledge facilities might be put to extra environment friendly use.
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Location flexibility: Colocation makes it straightforward to deploy IT gear in areas the place renewable vitality is abundantly out there. In distinction, constructing a non-public knowledge heart in a selected space to make the most of extra sustainable vitality sourcing tends to be much less possible, as a result of value and time required to construct a brand new facility.
Past environmental advantages, colocation gives companies entry to superior cooling applied sciences and renewable vitality sources with out vital upfront funding. Picture: Alamy.
The Potential Sustainability Drawbacks of Colocation Services
On steadiness, colocation knowledge facilities don’t at all times come out forward on the sustainability entrance. Not all colocation services provide extra environment friendly cooling and water administration options. Some are simply as inefficient in these areas as the everyday non-public knowledge heart. Neither is there a assure that every one colocation services will present entry to renewable vitality, definitely not on a steady foundation.
Because of this, companies that may afford to put money into sustainability-friendly options inside their very own knowledge facilities might discover this a greater strategy than utilizing colocation to enhance sustainability. It’s essential as properly to contemplate the full value. Colocation suppliers worth their choices with the aim of producing a revenue, and in the long term, it could be cheaper for a enterprise to put money into a sustainable knowledge heart of its personal moderately than pay a colocation firm.
The Public Cloud Various
It’s value noting as properly that public cloud knowledge facilities are additionally often extra sustainable than non-public knowledge facilities. That is due primarily to the large economies of scale of those services (they’re known as “hyperscale knowledge facilities” for a cause), mixed with the excessive utilization charges they obtain by renting IT infrastructure to tens of 1000’s of various prospects utilizing an IaaS mannequin.
That stated, for corporations centered on sustainability, there are causes to choose colocation services over the general public cloud. Past the maybe apparent proven fact that colocation gives way more management (as a result of it permits companies to deploy and handle their very own servers, moderately than renting servers from a public cloud), it’s additionally simpler to trace effectivity metrics inside a colocation facility.
On high of this, colocation knowledge facilities usually present better-defined ensures about the place vitality comes from. In a public cloud, you usually don’t know precisely which knowledge heart hosts a given workload, not to mention the place the electrical energy powering the workload’s host server originates. Colocation suppliers typically do present this degree of transparency into energy sourcing.
Colocation as a Sustainability Answer
Sustainability shouldn’t be an organization’s solely consideration when migrating workloads to a colocation facility. Components like value, safety and the administration of colocated {hardware} must also be thought of.
Nonetheless, sustainability is an under-appreciated good thing about colocation. Exceptions definitely exist, however total, colocation services usually tend to ship higher sustainability outcomes than non-public, devoted knowledge facilities.
