Digital transformation and the increasing demand for cloud services have resulted in the global surge of data centre construction. But while data centres are a critical component of the digital economy, they have led to increased energy consumption and carbon emissions. To counteract this impact, there is a need for the industry to focus on sustainability.
This blog post discusses how the future of data centres and cloud services must be sustainable and ways to achieve this goal.
Sustainability needs to be at the core of any data centre’s operations. This includes more than just incorporating solar panels. For example, at Teraco, environmental sustainability is a business imperative. We are committed to being 100% powered by renewable energy by 2035.
To achieve this goal, Teraco has focused on energy efficiency and using the latest monitoring and cooling technology to reduce energy consumption. Our cooling systems use environmentally sustainable water management designs that put sustainability first and minimise the environmental impact.
Teraco values environmental sustainability, demonstrated by our investments in leading-edge technology, such as closed-loop chilled water systems that use 100% free air cooling. By adopting this design philosophy, Teraco achieves industry leading PUEs, reducing energy consumption, and eliminating the need for water in the cooling process.
Teraco’s commitment to environmental sustainability extends beyond its cooling systems to encompass all aspects of its operations. Teraco optimises its facilities’ energy efficiency through heat extraction, recycling, and heat containment measures, allowing all sites to run efficiently.
As in many other countries, sustainability-conscious clients have extended their ESG reporting obligations to include their supply chain in South Africa. This means third-party operated data centres like Teraco need to align with shareholders’ and clients’ international reporting best practices.
For environmentally conscious, sustainability-focused clients, choosing a colocation data centre provider focusing on sustainability and transparent reporting is crucial when deciding where to locate their IT equipment.
Outsourcing to colocation data centres can minimise the impact on the environment. This is because third-party data centre facility providers are more efficient than enterprises at running their data centres and server rooms due to the sheer size and scale of the operations.
Teraco is committed to achieving its renewable energy goal of running on 100% clean energy by 2035. To achieve this, we are building and developing a utility-scale 200MW solar plant and are rolling out our rooftop solar programme, for which we expect to have 6MW installed by the end of 2023.
Teraco also minimises its environmental impact by reducing the resources used. Teraco has implemented its on-site waste management programme across sites, installed rainwater catchment systems to minimise municipal water use, and deployed a water metering and monitoring programme.
One of the most significant differentiators of a data centre’s operations is achieving ISO 50001 (energy management) and ISO 14001 (environmental management) certifications across all facilities. Teraco is committed to maintaining these certifications and extending the standards to all new builds.
The demand for cloud services and data centres will continue to rise in the coming years. However, this also means data centres must become more sustainable to reduce environmental impact.
Colocation and cloud adoption trends
The unreliable provision of power supply is an ongoing challenge in South Africa that affects businesses, including data centres. Teraco has implemented measures to ensure its electrical and mechanical systems maintain a 99.999% system availability via concurrently maintainable and distributed redundant systems. These systems have built-in monitoring and resilience, allowing for quick remediation of technical faults without impacting service levels.
However, energy challenges have resulted in high costs for enterprises. This is due to increased diesel use, frequent maintenance and replacement of components impacted by wear, and the need for larger technical and standby teams. The rand/dollar exchange rate has also affected the cost of diesel and imported components, increasing the cost of building new server and data rooms.
These trends have accelerated the move by more enterprises to adopt third-party colocation facilities as an alternative to running in-house server rooms and data centres. This is because colocation data centres are more reliable and offer service level uptime in times of increased power outages.
Before embracing the move to the cloud, organisations must assess the cost structure of cloud applications and decide what workstreams will be cost-effective to move into the cloud and what workstreams or processes can remain on-premises. As enterprises begin their digital transformation journey, the data centre provider must become an enablement platform.
Organisations choosing a data centre provider should look for reliability, security, depth of the interconnection ecosystem, carrier-neutrality, diverse network availability and flexibility, and scalability. Teraco is Africa’s most interconnected data centre hub, acting as an open-access growth and innovation marketplace. Enterprises moving into a data centre provider that functions as an open access facility will have unrestricted access to service providers, an ecosystem of carriers, and all the global cloud on-ramps.
