HOW GREEN IS YOUR DATA CENTRE?
The latest trend among data centre owners is to prove their green credentials. SmartBunker, for instance, claims to be Britain’s first ever carbon-neutral host. The hosting company is procuring all of its energy from Ecotricity, one of the largest suppliers of wind energy in Europe.
Other hosts are looking to technologies like virtualisation and intelligent cooling to reduce processing power demands. HP, for instance, will be using smart sensors to regulate cooling fans, which will reduce cooling costs by 40%.
According to consultancy BroadGroup, data centres use 50 times more energy than an office block. It blames inefficiencies, server proliferation and rising data centre density for pushing power and cooling costs to exceed hardware expenditures. The annual energy costs of an average UK data centre are estimated at about 5.3 million Euro per year, according to BroadGroup. By 2010 this is expected to reach 11 million Euro, making the UK the most expensive place in Europe to host a data centre.