The more positive news is that over two thirds of data centres are proactively implementing policies and technologies that will enable them to minimise power consumption. Although the primary reason given for this was to save money during today’s difficult economic climate, the fact still remains that any reduction in power is a positive thing for the industry - especially when data centre energy requirements are expected to double over the next four years. Any curb on this will be a welcome shift for the sector.
Worryingly, the research also revealed that 8% of data centre managers are not bothered about their future power consumption, and are not implementing any power saving strategies to be more green - a dangerous attitude given the sector’s power-hungry reputation. One in ten data centre managers would like to be doing more to reduce power consumption, but concerns that implementing these strategies would be too difficult and impact upon the service they can offer customers are preventing them from taking steps.
Not a single respondent thought that their data centre was already completely optimised in terms of energy efficiency, highlighting the fact that there is still plenty of room for improvement in the sector, and with only 2% of managers stating that being more economical would be prohibitively expensive, it is a realistic aspiration for most data centres.