Environmental Impact
What does a Data Centre do?
What does a data centre do A Plain English Guide from 4D Data Centres.mp4Energy use in Data Centres
A report in 2008 stated that by 2010 electricity used in global data centres would likely account for between 1.1% and 1.5% of total electricity use.
One measure used in data centres is known as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)
A PUE of 2.0 means that for every watt of IT power, an additional watt is consumed to cool and distribute power
The European Union has established a Code of Conduct for Energy Efficiency in Data Centres
http://iet.jrc.ec.europa.eu/energyefficiency/ict-codes-conduct/data-centres-energy-efficiency
The image below shows the PUE rating of Google Data Centres (source) for further reading on PUE (link)
How can Data centres reduce their power usage?
Joe Kava, VP of Google's Data Center Operations, gives a tour inside a Google data center, and shares details about the security, sustainability and the core architecture of Google's infrastructure.
Further reading:
A facebook engineer also explains how they can reduce their usage in this video (Facebook Link)