A greener data center environment is better prepared for future needs in terms of capacity and space. IT experts have long known that green server rooms don’t just mean a smaller carbon footprint; they also represent increased efficiency and lowered costs. By combining the latest technology with an environmentally friendly design, businesses can reduce operating costs while remaining better prepared for future growth.
Jakarta for a Greener Data Center Location
What makes Jakarta an excellent location for a data center? The answer is simple: Indonesia’s low cost of electricity, the ease of building infrastructure, and the location’s strategic position.
Jakarta is a rapidly growing city in the booming Indonesian IT industry and is home to a vibrant and lively IT community. The capital city of Indonesia is known as the political and financial center of the Southeast Asian country. Due to its rapid growth, Jakarta’s economy has become increasingly dependent on IT services. Companies such as IBM, Accenture, Cisco Systems, and Google have established their regional headquarters or significant branch offices in Jakarta.
Read also: Green Data Center Investment in Jakarta, Indonesia
As the world becomes increasingly more dependent on Information and Communication Technology (ICT), the need for a greener data center design becomes more pressing. The current data center designs are energy-inefficient, which causes a higher server cost and poor user experience. To develop a greener data center, we must adopt efficient building materials for construction, facility equipment, and operation.
Efficiency and Environmental Friendly are The Most Important Factors
In this article, we will discuss the steps in developing a greener data center with several green design criteria in mind, such as:
- Energy efficiency – Less than 50% power usage effectiveness (PUE)
- Land use efficiency – High density of rack per floor area with no raised floor concept
- Water use efficiency – Low water consumption rate with grey water reuse system and rainwater harvesting system
- Material efficiency – Recycling construction material waste and using local construction materials.
One of the most challenging issues facing businesses today is power consumption. The amount of energy required by data centers has increased exponentially over the past decade, and there are no signs of this trend slowing down.
A recent study by McKinsey & Company predicts that data center electricity use will grow nearly twice as fast as any other single part of the energy industry over the next fifteen years. To address these issues, companies are turning to new technologies and processes that help them reduce their carbon footprint, save money on energy costs, and maintain reliable infrastructure.
How can businesses reduce their carbon emissions?
One strategy is to build a greener data center in Jakarta. A green data center is a facility designed to minimize its environmental impact by reducing its use of natural resources and maximizing efficiency in its power usage.
By incorporating sustainable design concepts into their design from the beginning, companies can help ensure that the facility will continue to adhere to high environmental standards for years to come. These principles should be applied not just to the physical aspects of the building but also to the IT infrastructure inside it.
Designing a Greener Data Center
Newer data centers built with green principles attempt to reduce these issues by creating an environment that encourages energy conservation and efficient operation. For example, they often incorporate “free cooling” into their design by using outside air or even groundwater sources for cooling purposes instead of large chillers.
Designing a greener data center facilitates collaboration between the facility and its customers to create a sustainable computing environment. It’s important to point out that we’re talking about “greener” not as something less environmentally harmful but as something that helps reduce an organization’s carbon footprint.
Putting sustainability into action includes both environmental and economic considerations. The following are some guiding principles for creating a greener data center:
- Reducing energy usage in the data center.
- Reducing waste and recycling.
- Evolving our infrastructure to become more efficient and reliable.
- Embracing new technologies.
- Creating awareness and education within your organization.
While this is an excellent step in the right direction, it only does a little good if the data center is designed with sustainability. Data centers are not just huge buildings full of computers; they are complex environmental systems that must be carefully managed to maximize efficacy and minimize cost.
There are many ways for companies to reduce their carbon footprint and start saving money on their electricity bills if they follow specific guidelines when designing their data centers. One example is using smart power supplies for powering servers instead of standard ones.
Built and Operates
When constructing a data center, choosing an energy-efficient building design can be an excellent business decision. It’s because modern data center designs have created new cooling and power distribution methods that reduce a facility’s overall energy consumption by up to 50%.
Free cooling technology uses outside air conditioners or water chillers to cool server rooms, reducing the need for expensive mechanical systems. Older data centers often used vast amounts of energy to cool the servers they housed.
Monitoring and managing a data center ensures that the facilities and services a data center provides meet its clients’ needs. The term management describes the oversight of these facilities, while monitoring is the measurement or tracking of various operational parameters. You can use these operating parameters to determine the performance and status of a data center’s components, physical infrastructure, and services.
Another method that helps reduce data center energy consumption is virtualization technology. Virtualization allows multiple operating systems to run on one piece of hardware, thereby reducing the amount of physical equipment needed in a data center.
But with data center capacity at an all-time high, it’s more important than ever to find ways to increase the efficiency and lower the cost of running those facilities. A recent survey found that companies want to reduce costs, become greener in their data centers, and increase network performance.
What are the challenges?
The design phase is one of the most crucial steps in building a greener data center. Integrating green technology seamlessly into the data center infrastructure is key to a successful and sustainable green data center. This requires careful planning and design, especially during the site selection process. A good starting point is to analyze how existing facilities can be maximized and how each operational area can be more energy efficient.
The challenges facing data center managers have increased over the past decade due to three main factors:
- Increased systems’ complexity has led to more components and processes within the data center.
- Increased complexity of software development, including additional security issues and dependencies.
- Increased reliance on outsourcing by organizations for more complex services such as application hosting and storage.
Many data centers have made an environmentally conscious decision to invest in hybrid cooling solutions. Hybrid cooling allows data centers to cut down on energy use and carbon emissions by using chilled water for heating and cooling systems. The water is used to cool the servers when a heat wave rolls through, and then it’s used again in the winter to heat the facility and warm up the IT equipment. This two-in-one solution reduces the energy required for the building’s heating and cooling system and lowers the emissions associated with electricity production.
The main challenge in introducing hybrid cooling into a data center is ensuring you’re doing it right. The way that you design your chilled water system can have an impact on its efficiency and your costs over time.
To do it right, you need to have an experienced professional help you choose your equipment and design; you also need to make sure that your plans are feasible and don’t increase your risk of system failure. The last thing you want is to run into problems down the road due to ignoring your facility’s unique needs.
Conclusion
Green data centers have become common in recent years as companies have begun to see the benefit of incorporating sustainable design principles into their data center infrastructure. While there are many ways to measure data center sustainability, a comprehensive approach to the concept includes considering the facility’s energy efficiency and ability to reduce carbon emissions and water use, minimize waste, and conserve natural resources.
As the demand for data centers continues to grow, the need for environmentally friendly designs becomes increasingly essential. With its increased reliance on variable load technologies, energy-efficient cooling, and renewable energy sources, the modern data center has become a key component in enabling sustainable economic growth.
Going green has become a top priority for many data centers as well. The benefits of going green are endless to the company and its employees, such as lower energy costs that translate into higher profits, higher productivity, and improved employee retention.
We realize that how we operate our data centers can impact the environment, so we are taking steps to become more sustainable by reducing our carbon footprint and increasing resource efficiency.
Read more: Data Center Transformation for Sustainable Development