Sustainability has become a top priority for many organizations. But what’s the most efficient way to move the needle?
A data center consumes about 1,000 kWh per square meter, is about ten times the power consumption of a typical American home. Companies can make a significant environmental impact by reducing their data center footprint.
Let's explore how to green your data center to reduce your environmental impact while upgrading your infrastructure and increasing your ROI.
6 Steps to Reducing Your Data Center’s Environmental Footprint
Looking for data center upgrades that are good for the environment and your business? The most effective strategies focus on reducing hardware usage, which is capital-, maintenance-, and energy-intensive. Here is how to maximize:
1. Deploy a Hyperconverged Infrastructure
A hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) combines compute, storage, and networking into a single appliance. Data reduction techniques lower storage requirements, while hardware consolidation improves efficiency, reduces your data center’s physical footprint, simplifies management, lowers resource usage, and improves scalability.
Upgrading to a hyperconverged architecture can reduce energy consumption and improve cooling efficiency significantly, whether your infrastructure resides in the cloud or an on-premises data center. HPE SimpliVity is a popular HCI solution.
2. Migrate to a Private Cloud
Some organizations must use on-premises or dedicated equipment to handle sensitive data and processes. Implementing a private cloud allows you to take advantage of cloud efficiency and reduce your carbon footprint while improving your security posture and complying with industry regulations.
Private clouds are hosted in your organization’s data center or a third-party facility. They give you more control over your data and infrastructure to meet compliance requirements. They also support technologies like virtualization and resource pooling to reduce hardware requirements, resulting in more efficient energy and space usage. HPE GreenLake is a popular private cloud solution
3. Virtualize Servers and Desktops
Virtualization is the creation of virtual versions of computing resources like servers, operating systems, storage devices, or networks on a single physical machine. It allows you to manage the virtual environment independent of the underlying physical infrastructure and use the same hardware for various purposes to reduce equipment requirements.
You can consolidate servers, lower equipment costs, reduce data center footprint, simplify management, improve scalability, optimize resource utilization, and increase agility to respond to fast-changing business requirements.
4. Use Cloud-Native Services
Cloud-native applications and services are designed to maximize the capabilities and benefits of cloud environments. They leverage containers, microservices, serverless computing, and dynamic orchestration to achieve scalability, flexibility, portability, efficient resource utilization, and load-balancing automation.
These technologies use cloud-native architecture to achieve effective server consolidation and virtualization. Since more cloud providers are using renewable energy sources and adopting energy-efficient technologies, cloud services allows you to reduce your carbon footprint without changing your own infrastructure.
5. Monitor and Optimize Energy Consumption
Becoming energy-conscious and monitoring data center energy consumption can help you eliminate inefficiencies, improve sustainability, and reduce energy costs. You can use data insights to identify opportunities for optimization, such as adjusting cooling and power usage, consolidating resources, and optimizing workloads.
6. Choose Technology Partners with Strong Green Operational Commitments
Greening your data center involves many moving parts, but the good news is that you don’t have to embark on this journey alone. You can vote with your wallet and partner with a technology solution vendor that has invested heavily in sustainability.
The right technology partner can help reduce your carbon footprint in various ways. These include using recycled packaging materials, choosing commonly replaceable components, using green energy (e.g., solar power) to power data centers, reducing e-waste with responsible device end-of-life practices, and incentivizing their MSP partners to participate in sustainable practice certifications.
For example, Compugen’s Green4Good program demonstrates our commitment to the responsible recycling and re-use of IT equipment. Choosing the right technology partners is a great way to fast-track your commitment to sustainability.
Fast-Track Your Journey to Sustainability
When implementing a sustainability strategy, you should evaluate your IT infrastructure, including hardware, software, and networking, to determine the most cost-effective approach. Also, consider the skills and resources required to manage technologies such as HCI and virtualized or private cloud environments.
However, not every organization has the in-house knowledge and expertise to support their sustainability initiatives. The good news is that you don’t have to go it alone.
Compugen offers various data center and cloud services that align with the latest sustainability best practices to help organizations reduce their carbon footprint while increasing operational cost efficiency. Get in touch to see how we can help you fast-track your effort.
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