Energy Efficiency Plan: What Role Can Data Centers Play in 2023?

The government's energy efficiency plan requires limiting the use of air conditioning in data centers, if the infrastructure allows. According to France Datacenter, raising the temperature from 21 to 23 degrees in IT rooms can reduce energy consumption by approximately 7 to 10%.

While IT equipment can now withstand higher cooling air inlet temperatures, raising the overall temperature in data centers requires thorough knowledge of the specifics of cooling equipment, electrical equipment, and IT equipment hosted in IT rooms, and in particular mastery of all necessary airflows. However, compliance with temperature increase guidelines is not sufficient to achieve significant results. It must be accompanied by infrastructure modification work such as aisle containment, cooling system optimization, or installation modularity.

Such optimization projects require an in-depth analysis phase to account for all data center parameters: surface area, equipment power, load rate, physical infrastructure, cooling systems, airflow, environmental constraints (dust, humidity level, etc.), equipment technical maintenance, etc. Whatever actions need to be implemented, a solid strategy must first be developed in which short-term actions will serve as the foundation for subsequent operations, in order to maximize the energy savings potential of each data center with longer-term actions.

Furthermore, beyond increasing temperature in IT rooms, energy savings can be achieved without major investments, solely by improving facility management and mobilizing stakeholders. These best practices are shared among peers as part of the CUBE Datacenters project, a national energy savings competition in IT whose first edition was launched in January 2023.

Beyond reducing the energy consumption of data center infrastructure, the energy consumption of enterprise information systems must also be considered and reduced.

Information systems include elements such as software and IT equipment, service networks and platforms, and data and application governance. The way all these elements are designed and managed determines the necessary hosting infrastructure and, consequently, the energy required to ensure service continuity of information systems.

Until now, IT solutions and infrastructure were designed without concern for energy consumption: abundance of features not necessarily all useful or used, large server capacities allocated from the outset to support future organizational growth (even if it proves lower than anticipated), or rich application interfaces that are heavy and therefore demanding in IT resources, and consequently in energy resources.

To maximize achievable energy savings, it is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of the information system and to build a long-term energy efficiency approach. In other words, it involves evaluating the existing situation based on realistic data and feedback from the field, in order to define the actions to implement to find the right balance between needs and resources. And therefore, to avoid oversizing as much as possible.

To implement a digital sobriety initiative, it is essential to objectify potential improvement areas. The first step therefore consists of identifying and quantifying the environmental impacts of digital services, including energy consumption, throughout their entire lifecycle, from the extraction of resources necessary for their design to their recovery at end of life, including use and production of material flows during the usage phase.

The quantification of environmental impacts must be based on an established framework, using data provided by ADEME or the NegaOctet consortium, for example. It allows, at a given moment, identification of measures to take to reduce energy consumption and environmental impact without pollution transfer. For example, replacing IT equipment at the right time: neither too early to limit overly frequent renewals with high environmental impact, nor too late to unnecessarily prolong the use of equipment that is too energy-intensive.

These analyses must be performed both during the design of a digital service and during operation, on a regular basis, to continuously optimize digital services and maintain them as close as possible to their optimal efficiency potential.

From a forward-looking perspective, successive innovations contribute to the future energy efficiency of data centers: increased IT equipment capacity for equivalent environmental cost, progressive development of solutions using the data center's immediate environment (air or water) as input for cooling or as output to heat nearby buildings (waste heat utilization), or application of innovative cooling techniques. This is the case, for example, with server immersion cooling in non-conductive oil: in addition to considerably reducing data center energy consumption, this solution enables recovery and reuse of waste heat produced by servers, facilitates relocation of data centers closer to points of use, and reduces the space occupied by the cooling system, with the resulting economic and environmental benefits.

As these innovations are deployed and facility management improves, data centers should therefore further significantly improve their energy efficiency and reduce their environmental footprint.

By Soumia Hattali, Sustainable IT Project Manager, APL Data Center.