Green Data Centers: A Sustainable Digital Infrastructure

Author:

Avinash Jain

Vice President Sales – Cloud and Infrastructure Services, Tech Mahindra

In today's digital world, data drives innovation and growth. This growth also impacts environmental challenges as the traditional data centers consume high energy and leaves behind carbon footprint.  To address these challenges, the emergence of green data centers is underway.

Sandeep Chandna, our Chief Sustainability Officer, recently spoke about the importance of establishing sustainable digital infrastructure at the Business Transformation (BT) Sustainability Festival in 2023. He mentioned that the company’s approach to implement a sustainable digital infrastructure and green IT can help them to achieve sustainability goals. We at TechM are committed to reducing emissions and promoting a more sustainable digital landscape. We have also set a public target to certify our engineers and data coders in eco-design and green IT practices by FY 2025-26. As a part of our commitment, we have launched training sessions for our engineers and data coders focused on green data coding.

The Green Data Center Overview

Energy efficiency, renewable energy, and environmental responsibility are major factors when it comes to green data centers. Green data centers, as the name suggests, help minimize environmental footprint by leveraging sustainable practices and advanced technologies. Some of these practices include solar and wind power sources, liquid cooling by leveraging energy efficient hardware to enhance efficiency.

These methods significantly lower their carbon footprint. It is an economical and sustainable option since it lowers energy consumption along with decrement in overall operating cost for an organization. This also reduces environmental footprint by having responsible and recyclable waste management system.

Recycling of electronic waste, including retired servers and hardware components, reduces the demand for more raw material. Such a data center is a game changer and plays an important role in mitigating the environmental repercussion of expanding the digital infrastructure, and in turn, helps to achieve a more sustainable future.

Selecting a Green Data Center That Benefits Businesses

Below are the benefits businesses should not miss while leveraging green data centers in their organizations.

Environmental impact reduction: Green data center achieve this by leveraging renewable energy, reducing carbon emission and resource consumption, and aligning with sustainable objectives.

Scalability and flexibility: It is designed in a way by which Infrastructure can be adjusted to meet the needs without sacrificing efficiency or sustainability.

Cost savings: There will be direct cost savings when using green data center’s energy efficiency options. This will allow organizations to reallocate the resources more efficiently.

Innovative collaboration: Investment in green data centers help improve collaboration and innovation within the industry. This indeed helps in driving progress towards more efficient and more importantly eco-friendly solutions on a global scale.

Challenges

Initial investment costs: Upfront cost is a major factor in integrating green technologies into data centers and can become a barrier to adopt particularly for smaller businesses or those with limited budgets.

Integration: Incorporating green technologies into existing data center infrastructure presents challenges, including compatibility issues and the need for specialized expertise.

Performance Optimization: Balancing energy efficiency with performance optimization is crucial, requiring careful management to ensure that efficiency gains do not compromise performance or reliability.

Lifecycle Management and E-Waste: Effectively managing equipment lifecycle and minimizing electronic waste are ongoing challenges for green data centers, necessitating sustainable practices for procurement, maintenance, and disposal.

Tech Mahindra: Your Partner for a Greener Future

Tech Mahindra has decades of experience in sustainability and a proven track record of consistent performance in Global sustainability disclosures and forums that makes us an ideal partner of choice. We offer an end-to-end services for implementing sustainability from strategy to execution with the support of our ESG team. We assist data center clients in achieving energy efficiency by implementing energy monitoring systems to measure power usage effectiveness (PUE) and continuously track and identify current consumption and baselines. We leverage analytics-driven techniques to drive effective air conditioning operations based on time of day (TOD) analysis, server demands, hot and cold isle remedies and additional sensors for efficiency monitoring, ensuring uniform temperature across data centers. We bring comprehensive solutions package for complete data center energy efficiency improvement with IoT smart platform and analytics.

Furthermore, Tech Mahindra, being an industry leading IT services provider, can help clients define the logical structure of server placement based on load, usage, and consumption. We can also identify the ghost servers without any disruptions and recommend the latest and green IT infrastructure with high power efficiency.

Conclusion

Green data centers offer paradigm shift in computing and are a sustainable alternative to traditional infrastructure. Organizations can move towards a greener, more sustainable future by adopting renewable energy and giving priority to energy efficiency. Green data centers are the new future that will shape the landscape of computing for generations to come.

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About the Author

Avinash Jain
Vice President Sales – Cloud and Infrastructure Services, Tech Mahindra

He has over 22 years of experience in IT, covering various functions and domains, such as client relationship management, engagement management, account management, software research and development, project management, and on-shore and off-shore coordination. In his current role, he is responsible for the cloud and infra services portfolio for the Americas strategic vertical (healthcare, manufacturing, oil and gas, retail, CPG, travel, and logistics, and BFSI).