Data-Centers could be contributing significantly to global warming. Estimates by Gartner are that energy costs could be up to 12% of the total running-costs of a Data Center and is growing at 11% per annum, due to the huge increase in smartphone usage (1.1 billion by 2013).
The EU base their policy on an estimate of electricity consumption by data centers of 56 TWh per year in Europe, doubling by 2020. This alarming figure includes temperature regulation, lighting, backup power and so on, as well as the actual servers.
This is one of the reasons why Virtualization has caught on so fast.
The EU’s Code of Conduct for Data Centers on Energy Efficiency. Although it is currently only ‘advisory’ legislation for limiting energy usage is coming.
In the UK, there is the ‘Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme’, which threatens draconian fines to companies with large energy-consumption that do not register, and it encourages firms to indulge in ‘carbon trading’. The increasing heavy-handed legislation on the energy usage of data centers is driving investment in huge data centers in countries with less legislation interest in avoiding climate change, and ‘off-shoring’ of data services so that it becomes someone else’s problem.
We are now using virtualisation for most of our installs to run several logical servers on one physical server. In addition to energy saving, there is also the beneoft of reduced space needed, and easier management.
Synergy offers cloud hosting for Microsoft Dynamics Ax and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
