Empowering Data Centers
It’s all about power reliability and availability when it comes to data centers in India. Over the last decade, the global industry has strived for significant improvements in overall data center efficiency through implementing a ‘Green Data Center’
Everyone knows that one of the largest cost drivers for the data center industry is the cost of power. It takes huge amounts of electricity to power and cool a data center, so when it comes to data centers in India it is really important the industry strives to improve power efficiency, reliability, and availability for current and future data center stock.
Currently, the continued lack of availability of reliable power supply is not doing India justice when it comes to its attractiveness as a location for data centers. Presently a significant number of data centers in India rely on backup energy sources such as diesel generators, in order to face the regular power shutdown that can be around two to three hours daily. Thus, while locating a data center, the service provider needs to calculate the trade-off between reliability and tariff reforms in a state. Higher reliability typically comes in states with higher energy costs. Rising energy costs increase the data center operational
expenses. In power-deficit India, energy efficiency can offer significant benefits to data centers including increased reliability of electricity supply, reduction in operating costs and an overall enhancement in operations.
India has significant potential for data center growth due to lots of factors not least the countries skilled labor force. However, companies need to find ways to mitigate risks related to power reliability and power cost issues.
MEASURING ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Over the last decade, the global industry has strived for significant improvements in overall data center efficiency through implementing a ‘Green Data Center’ strategy. Looking at a comprehensive energy efficiency assessment framework can have a direct impact on OPEX. All data center operators in India, if they haven’t done so already, should be developing a framework for maximizing the performance of their existing infrastructure assets and putting operational disciplines in place to maintain them.
Incorporating the most advanced energy efficiency best practices at the design stage is crucial for newcomers and existing operators in the Indian market. Comparing sets of assessment data from each stage through the design to operation of a data center can help the operator validate the integration of energy efficiency measures in the design, and then assess these against the performance of the operational facility.
Applications are increasingly becoming “Geo Redundant’ with less risk of failure being placed on the underlying power infrastructure. This ability to migrate workloads on the server side is now becoming proven, reducing operator concerns about protecting power-related events for these geo-redundant applications. This, combined with a growing number of more reliable larger sized data centers, seems to be having a positive impact on overall systems availability.
As a result of the advances in the application layer, incremental marginal gains in energy efficiency can more easily be achieved south of the rack. These are now being considered as the risk of application failure reduces.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Adoption of energy-efficient practices can improve the global competitiveness and sustainability of data centers in India. Previous studies have concluded that advancement of energy efficiency standards through policy and regulatory mechanisms is the fastest path to accelerate the adoption of energy efficient practices. This is not different in India and the country is gearing up to extend a set of controls and certifications for data centers that can help tackle the increasing global environmental issues. These regulations and accreditations will hopefully assist data centers to adopt best practices for better energy-efficient, effective and robust infrastructure. Unfortunately, it is not looking like these accreditations will be legally mandatory for a data center in India, but will clearly add value if data centers choose to adopt them. Being operationally efficient and adopting best practices from an energy efficiency perspective is just one side of the PUE equation. Removing ‘comatose’ servers and redundant IT assets is a completely different challenge but certainly, one that Indian companies should consider exploring, but that’s a whole other discussion.
Adoption of energy-efficient practices can improve the global competitiveness and sustainability of data centers in India Incorporating the most advanced energy efficiency best practices at the design stage is crucial for newcomers and existing operators in the Indian market