Being able to clearly visualize and maximize the use of data is of utmost importance for any company, as it allows them to adapt their decision making and adjust to the practical realities of their environment.
So, with an increasing focus on achieving environmental goals, it makes sense that sustainability data is quickly becoming a metric of particular interest, especially in energy-intensive data centers.
Schneider Electric aims to address this head-on with the launch of a new data center infrastructure management (DCIM) platform aimed at visualizing sustainability data.
Elizabeth Hackenson, CIO of Schneider Electric, went into more detail with ITPro about why this project brought sustainability data to the forefront and why it was so important to the company.
“We said, how do we measure the hundreds of thousands of IT assets that are connected across our enterprise?” Hacekenson said ITPro.
This question, placed in parallel with other Schneider Electric efforts, including the cloud migration of 10,000 servers, led the company to an internal sustainability review.
This, in turn, resulted in the launch of a new DCIM designed to report key sustainability metrics such as energy use effectiveness (PUE).
However, Schneider's efforts are part of a broader industry push to improve sustainability and effectively leverage data to achieve tangible environmental improvements. As Gartner Senior Principal Analyst Autumn Stanish said ITProThere are already many solutions for collecting sustainability data.
“There are many solutions out there and the metrics are becoming standardized,” Stanish said.
However, the main issue companies face is not the ability to collect sustainability data, but rather their awareness of the scope and importance of each individual data source.
“The first thing that's easily identified is the PUE metric…people are calculating their data center PUEs, but that metric alone is…incomplete,” Stanish said.
Other metrics are needed for a company to have a full picture of its sustainability impact, he added, including “a full view of what its actual carbon emissions are.”
Data centers do not operate in isolation, nor does energy consumption. Stanish highlighted the importance of the distinction made between scope two and scope three metrics.
While scope two represents purchased electricity and energy usage of the data center infrastructure, scope three refers to “everything that happens outside the data center.”
“All the manufacturing of the products and all the refurbishment or demanufacturing … at the end of their useful life,” Stanish said.
This third scope of the sustainability metric is where most data centers are struggling, he said.
Measuring how much electricity each server rack uses is critical, but true sustainability must also take into account whether the server racks are manufactured sustainably, for example.
“DCIM tools can't necessarily help with that,” he added.
The scope of these metrics can become quite complex, Stanish suggested, as companies must consider everything from the space they use to the equipment they purchase.
“That said, there has been a lot of progress in recent years to get the…metrics we need,” he added.
Stanish referred to bodies such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and its alignment with the EU code of conduct for data center efficiency, which have contributed to making the breadth of sustainability metrics be “more generalized.”
Data Center Sustainability Depends on Detailed Metrics
With the right sustainability metrics, data centers can not only make their business models more climate friendly, but they can also identify areas that will offer the greatest sustainability reward compared to the least effort.
“[If] “They have the data that shows where their emissions hotspots are and they can prioritize accordingly,” Stanish said.
Where some companies may focus on an initiative to reduce their footprint for the sake of sustainability, it may be the case that as an initiative this has a “high level of effort with low results in the grand scheme of things.”
“When it comes to the data center, there are [an] “There are an infinite number of different things that could be done to improve…sustainability in big and small ways,” Stanish said.
“Having the data helps you refine it and narrow it down to a few key ways you should do it for your unique environment,” he added.
It's about having the right scope of data that can then be optimized to maximize results.
Many companies are already manufacturing Great strides towards creating green data centers.. Some of the key areas of focus for these data centers include energy usage and water management.
Cisco, for example, announced plans to build its own solar plants in Spain to power its data centers in the region and offset total energy consumption.
