Why there is an urgent need for data centres to go green
environmental impact of data centres, which consume vast amounts of power and water, makes it imperative for companies operating these facilities to prioritise sustainability efforts.
Data centres are significant consumers of electricity. According to estimates, they use approximately 2% of the world’s power and emit CO2 that is equivalent to the airline industry’s emissions; the airline industry is a highly carbon-intensive business. Moreover, data centres’ energy use is known to double every four years, resulting in one of the fastest-growing carbon footprints.
By adopting sustainable practices and technologies, data storage solution companies can play a significant role in mitigating such impact. To fulfil such goals, storage solutions company Western Digital is looking to tackle power consumption challenges, including cooling — a critical aspect to data centre design — operational cost and hardware reliability.
Khalid Wani, Senior Director Sales-India, Western Digital, says that through its innovations, Western Digital enables significant increases in data storage capacity, reduced power consumption and enhanced data resilience.
One component of green data centres is storage infrastructure. Organisations can explore high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) that boast of offering greater storage density and low power. “For example, using 26TB HDDs instead of 16TB HDDs to deploy 2PB of storage would require 27% fewer servers and use 26% lower energy consumption in watts/TB, resulting in savings by eliminating
