First I need to explain to you where this comes from. Today, everything we do generates data: if you posted a photo, if you listened to music in an app, if you watched a streaming movie or if you used a map to go to a place you don’t know, all of this generated a lot of data on the internet, to this It is called big data, which is very useful for, for example, predicting traffic in a city. To take advantage of this information, data centers are needed.
A data center is a physical facility that companies use to host their applications and data (it’s those huge rooms with black boxes that look like refrigerators full of well-organized lights and colored cables). Here the data is stored, processed and converted into useful information for decision making. That is why data centers will become more important as companies take advantage of Artificial Intelligence, analytics or cloud, which are technologies that are completely based on data.
So if the use of data helps us to have better services, what is the problem? These facilities consume 2% of the electricity worldwide (a figure that is expected to rise to 8% by 2030) and, according to Greenpeace, they also account for 2% of global CO2 emissions.
This is when I start to sweat, because on the one hand we have the possibility to use all the known technology and because we have to improve the lives of people in the world, but on the other, we are polluting the planet where we live.
And it is that this goes beyond a traditional social responsibility plan, because it is not that only one company uses data centers, all IT companies have data centers! The problem is compounded considering that many non-tech companies, such as banks, need to have this infrastructure on-site. How to make an entire industry truly sustainable?
The power to collaborate
Since the key is to reduce electricity consumption, at a technical level you can opt for solar energy or implement liquid cooling, which requires less energy than air conditioners. You can also bet on Edge Computing, which consists of putting mini data centers close to where the data is generated, this reduces the amount of information transmission, processing, and therefore, not as much energy is consumed.
But these technical solutions remain in the decision of each company that decides to build a data center, they are not solutions at the industry level that can have a greater impact. Addressing environmental problems requires collaboration on a large scale. To radically change the way data centers operate, IT companies as a whole must pursue an open and integrated ecosystem.
I have already explained to you before what a open ecosystem , which in short is technology that, even if it is from different companies, can coexist and work together because it speaks the same language. In the case of data centers, an open technology ecosystem allows to simplify and accelerate the implementation of both hardware and solutions that can reduce their electricity consumption.