The Uptime Institute’s 13th annual ‘Global Data Center Survey’ revealed that digital infrastructure managers are increasingly concerned about improving energy efficiency within data centres due to tightening government regulations on carbon reduction. In fact, it’s the top concern.
Overall the top-five concerns were:
- Improving energy performance for facilities equipment (33%);
- A lack of qualified staff (30%);
- Improving energy performance for ICT (30%);
- Forecasting future data center capacity requirements (27%); and
- Procuring equipment needed to meet higher capacity demand (26%).
Sustainability reporting was shown to concentrate on infrastructure energy efficiency rather than reducing carbon emissions. It’s suggested that this may be because doing so relates to the bottom-line more strongly than carbon emissions. They’re also easier to track than carbon emissions.
The highest two environmental reporting priorities were:
- ICT or data centre power consumption (88%); and
- Power usage efficiency (71%).
Other factors like server utilisation, water usage, renewable energy consumption and eWaste were all around half those figures. Interestingly, of those concerned with carbon emissions, concern over Scope 1 carbon emission were highest at 28%. This probably reflects the fact that Scope 1 emissions are easier to act on than Scope 2 or 3 emissions.
Also revealed was the fact that 65% of respondents felt the public cloud wasn’t reliable enough to host mission-critical applications. Many respondents said they preferred to operate their own data centres for greater control. For respondents who didn’t use public cloud services 64% said security was the issue. Only 20% said public data centre resiliency were a concern.
The survey noted that AI was on most people’s minds, reporting the following opinions:
- AI will reduce data centre staffing levels in the next five years (25%);
- It will happen but will take longer than five years (48%); and
- Don’t think it will happen (27%).