Reducing Energy Consumption in Data Centres and the Increased Artificial Intelligence (AI) Power Demands
Energy consumption in data centres has become a growing concern for many as attention has been focussed on their environmental impact beyond simply power demand. Although not immediately impactful, recent ESG reporting requirements are predicted to have a significant and developing effect on the demands for increased data centre sustainability and energy efficiency within the European Union and beyond in 2025.
So, how can we effectively reduce energy consumption in data centres and will we eventually be able to do this using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology?
In this blogpost, Future-tech’s Head of Technical Due-Diligence, Mark Acton, discusses the most effective way to reduce energy consumption in data centres and debates whether AI itself will eventually enable lower data centre energy use.
Reducing Energy Consumption in Data Centres
The best, and arguably simplest, way to reduce overall energy consumption in data centres is to reduce the power consumption by the IT platforms hosted within data centres, for both AI platforms or applications, and more traditional compute (which is not going away anytime soon!).
Current IT platforms are generally woefully inefficient with low level hardware utilisation, devices powered up but doing no useful work, unnecessary equipment duplication and redundancy, as well as applications and operating systems coded without any thought for energy efficiency or resource overhead.
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Decreasing Data Centre Power Demands
Ultimately, we need to reduce the 1 in Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric, as opposed to solely focusing on the digits after the decimal point, as many, including legislators, seem intent on doing at the moment.
A conspiracy theorist might even suggest that PUE was invented to hide or divert attention away from the lumbering IT inefficiency elephant lurking in the corner of every data centre hall!
Genuine reductions in data centre energy consumption therefore require a multi-pronged approach – an ongoing reduction in the building overhead. However, the initiatives to improve IT hardware energy efficiency and the growing demand for ‘green’ software development are becoming increasingly important. Also, let’s not forget the power used in networks. There are currently groups working the energy consumption of subsea cables looking to introduce similar standardised Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to those we now have for data centres (ISO 30134 Series).
The Increasing Demand for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology
Ultimately, using AI to manage AI is a logical step…
Tools that can optimise workload delivery, in terms of energy efficiency, across increasingly complex estates and that can manage and reduce the cooling required for hybrid and mixed density deployments using Machine Learning and AI (such as EkkoSoft from EkkoSense) are evidently the way forward.
The data centre management tools with these enhanced features not only understand the environment that they are monitoring, or the processes they are managing, but they are also capable of offering AI based intelligent insight and solutions for energy efficiency that humans simply cannot bring to the table. That approach and the use of these tools is clearly marking the way forward.
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All Future-tech content is produced by human writers, without the use of any form of AI technology.