Everyone’s interested in helping the environment and in saving some money for the rainy days. If you find either or both facts appealing, it’s time to reconsider colour of the data centre especially when it comes to effective disaster recovery.
More and more businesses want greener and eco-friendly IT operations but don’t know where to begin with. While outsourcing operations and equipment, for a data centre it means someone else would tackle the electricity bill without any clarity as to how much energy your IT infrastructure is expending and whether your facility is in fact, “green”.
It doesn’t have to be this way at all, what you need is understanding green technology and implement the standards in the data centres that helps preserving the planet’s natural resources, your wallet and rather acceptable disaster recovery standards.
Green energy
If you really with to feel satisfied on the choice, make sure your colocation services are operating on green energy but, what does it exactly means! Since data centres require a great deal of energy to stay reliable and operational all the way through, it’s impractical for services like these to rely solely on solar or other forms of renewable energy sources.
Nonetheless, it’s the facility’s responsibility taking all effective measures to reduce over consumption of energy, sidestep all practices that are harmful to the environment and reduce pessimistic impacts. Introducing Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) standards is one way to measure implementation and effectivenes
While looking into PUE of a data centre is one way to comprehend effectiveness of green energy, it’s important asking colo provider about the strategies and objectives towards reducing its carbon footprint. This is important as simple statistics and numbers against PUE may be misleading at times.
As we speak, there’re many data centres out there that boast over their infrastructure being 100-percent PUE compliant however in reality, it’s the other way around. So it’s very important being careful and thorough with your research and look for facilities that are indeed most environmentally effective and efficient.
The greener wallet
Ever wonder what green energy has to do with your finances! Well the answer is, a whole lot and it all depends on the number of factors such as colo that you’ve partnered with and terms of the contract for which you obviously need a service fees. If the company’s operating at a higher PUE or simply doesn’t follow the eco-friendly practices, it’s clear they’re consuming a whole lot of energy than unnecessarily that results in higher than usual cost.
Even with a greener data centre practicing all the right cloud based disaster recovery strategies, they need operating within a defined spectrum. Take for instance; installing ventilation systems that could pollute the adjacent habitation and degrading air quality raises serious concerns. Another consideration is setting up the facility in an environment that’s already polluted and harmful to the IT infrastructure and equipment.
Either way, you’ll shell out more and more money for new equipment and frequent replacement which is totally contradictory to the concept of “greener wallet”. This is why asking about a data centre’s strategy is important as well as holding enquiry related to the air quality and overall environment in which the servers and critical IT equipment would be exposed.
Green light is for environmental responsibility
While it’s smart looking into energy consumption charts of a data centre, asking about the strategies and practices to reduce toxic elements in the infrastructure such as Lead and Sulphuric Acid commonly used in power backup is also important. In addition, water is one of the most precious resources that’s reducing at an alarming rate and the change has triggered global climate change which is rather pessimistic.
Conclusion
All being said and done, our responsibility towards environment doesn’t end with energy consumption or simply utilising renewable sources. In fact, take whole environment as a picture is a way to ensure practicing green for disaster recovery in rather a friendly way!
