The current energy crisis has caused energy costs to rise across Europe, making energy efficiency the number one priority for CIOs and data center providers. To dig deeper, Nutanix has released a report to help business decision makers not only minimize energy costs, but radically reduce the carbon footprint of their data centers. “Data centers and digital infrastructures as a whole represent a substantial part of energy consumption worldwide, with a considerable carbon footprint,” according to Sammy Zoghlami, SVP of Nutanix EMEA.
Energy efficiency
Events such as COP27 have made companies aware of the need to place sustainability and environmental protection at the top of the strategic agenda. The main conclusions of the Nutanix report include: Automation, cooling systems, renewable energy and the transformation of traditional 3-tier architectures towards next-generation models -such as hyper-converged infrastructures (HCI)- will be key to reducing consumption energy consumption of data centers and their carbon footprint.Measurable benefits can be achieved in a wide range of organizations, from hyperscalar, to managed service providers, large enterprises and small businesses.Compared to traditional 3-tier computing platforms , next-generation HCI architectures could reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint by approximately 27% per year. Across the EMEA region, the HCI transformation has the potential to reduce energy consumption by 56, 7 TWh and reduce emissions by 14.2 million tons of CO²e during the period 2022-2025.
Energy efficiency, how to reduce the carbon footprint in data centers
Large-scale co-location model data centers (those where customers can access space, power, cooling, and other value-added services) offer a PUE (power usage efficiency) factor ) much lower than traditional installations. Switching to HCI architectures could increase energy savings by up to 30-40%. These co-location data centers could provide access to renewable energy through long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) and thus contributing to the goal of “climate neutrality” without having to invest in CO2 certificates. Companies planning to move to an HCI architecture within their own on-premises data centers should also evaluate next-generation cooling technologies in the face of increasing energy prices. The data center industry has delivered significant energy efficiency improvements in recent decades and is now one of the most advanced in decarbonization. However, the demand for energy will increase substantially and will lead to large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions. Innovative technologies, such as HCI, contribute to efficiency and energy cost savings.
