With energy costs constantly increasing, and also with the attention to environmental sustainability on the part of customers, partners and banking institutions that provide loans, the topic of data center energy efficiency is once again topical. The data center employs servers, storage, and network equipment that absorb a lot of energy in operation, energy largely dissipated in the form of heat with the use of air conditioning systems. A complex system whose energy impact is often not distinguished from that of offices or is not considered when making IT renovation choices. Obsolete data center infrastructures lead to higher energy costs for the same power, both due to less efficient hardware and non-optimized applications that involve redundancy and synchronization. According to European Commission data reported by Bloomberg, data centers account for over 2.7% of electricity demand in Europe. Without structural changes, the digital transformation, the development of the internet, e-commerce, and streaming will push the share to 3.2% already by 2030, equal to about 100 Terawatt hours: double what Greece consumed in 2019.
The efficiency of data centers becomes a necessity, which first of all requires measurement capabilities. A standard indicator is the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) which gives the ratio between the energy used by IT systems and the total absorbed. With the PUE, the degree of efficiency (DCIE-Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency) is estimated by distinguishing how much electrical power is dedicated to IT equipment compared to the service equipment, such as the air conditioning system or uninterruptible power supplies. Measurement of energy overhead, the PUE is better the closer it gets to 1, the theoretical level at which all energy would be used for processing.
To date, large data centers have a PUE between 2 and 1.6, which can drop to about 1.3 for those of modern design with more efficient cooling methods and sophisticated power management systems, integrated with logical resource management from the point of view of the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). BinHexS has in its portfolio services for the modernization of data centers and the ability to manage all phases of a project: from design to implementation on any type of infrastructure. BinHexS also offers data center and management services provided on a local and remote basis, integrating skills and time management, with teams operating 24×7.