Last week we talked about key trends for software development expected for 2019, and today we’ll discuss another trend for the coming year that’s a bit more of a given. That being that datacenters will have even more demands placed on their capacities as we continue to become more of a digital working world all the time. Indeed, datacenters have grown to be key partners for enterprises, rather than being just an external service utilized for storing data and business operation models. Even the smallest of issues in datacenter operations can impact business. While datacenters are certainly lifeblood for every business, they also have global impacts and in particular as it relates to energy consumption. Somewhere in the vicinity of 3% of total electricity consumption worldwide is made by datacenters, and to put that in perspective that’s more than the entire power consumption of the UK. Datacenters also account for 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and 2% electronic waste (aka e-waste). Many people aren’t aware of the extent to which our growingly digital world impacts the natural one so directly, but it really does. Like any good Canadian web hosting provider who provides the service for thousands of customers, we have extensive datacenter requirements ourselves. Most will make efforts to ensure their datacenters operate as energy-efficiently as possible, and that goes along with the primary aim – making sure those data centers are rock-solid reliable AND as secure as possible. Let’s take a look today at what’s being done around the globe to promote environmental sustainability with data centers. Lack of Environmental Policies Super Micro Computer recently put out a report entitled ‘Data Centers and the Environment’ and it stated that 43% of organizations don’t have an environmental policy, and another 50% have no plans to develop any such policy anytime soon. Reasons why? high costs (29%), lack of resources or understanding (27%), and then another 14% don’t make environmental issues a priority. The aim of the report was to help datacenter managers better understand the environmental impact of datacenters, provide quantitative comparisons of other companies, and then in time help them reduce this impact. Key Findings 28% of...
