Data Centre Virtualisation to Reduce Emissions

We discuss the following topics in this blog:

1. Increasing migration to the cloud.
2. Data Centre and Renewable Integration
3. STL Data Centre and Solutions

In addition to these topics, we shall also be answering the following FAQs:

1. What is WiFi?
2. What is a data centre?

Overview

Many organisations around the world have stepped on to cloud in the last few years to minimise the use of internal resources. Cloud computing ensures manageability and security while also reducing the operational cost of data. As the world becomes digitised, cloud data centres have emerged as an important way for cutting down on energy consumption. 

Aurora Energy Research, a power market analytics firm, recently published a report suggesting that virtualisation technology deployment and its continued improvements may minimise the potential future computing emissions in Europe by 55% in the next two decades.

According to the report, virtualisation software, optimisation of operations, and hardware upgrades in IT operations facilitate superior productivity and better outcomes in energy efficiency. Along with an augmented usage of renewable energy to fulfil electricity requirements, such energy-saving measures can aid IT operations in reducing their carbon footprint to a reasonable extent. The report further underlined that European computing emissions could grow by more than 250% over the next two decades in a zero-progress situation. However, with continuous improvements in virtualisation technology, a CO2 reduction of 454 tonnes is possible by 2020-21, 55% lower than the Zero Progress scenario.

Is Cloud Computing on the Rise?

The cloud computing system has witnessed incredible growth over the years. An increasing number of companies are now using cloud data centres and leveraging digitised information to transform their business operations, leading to continued growth in the overall computing demand. Adopting various computing-intensive revolutionary technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and blockchain is slowly becoming more widespread.

Energy Conservation with Server Virtualisation

In cloud computing, data server virtualisation is a prominent strategy that involves creating several virtual servers from a single physical one. It essentially paves the way for consolidating many servers by enabling several workloads on one physical host server. Virtualisation can lessen the floor space needed to set up a physical data centre, which subsequently reduces the building size and number of people required to run the centre, apart from minimising the facility’s energy consumption. Virtualisation has become popular as an efficient hardware resource utilisation method which also has a significant role in reducing carbon emissions. 

Data Centre and Renewable Integration

While intermittency of specific renewable energies like solar and wind pose challenges that call for better system flexibility, data centres can also aid in integrating renewable energies into the electricity grids. They can do so by: 

• Making use of their backup/emergency battery storage to balance the demand and supply on the grid.
• Optimising the cooling of IT infrastructure to provide greater flexibility to the grid.
• Engaging in demand response by minimising data centre power consumption to appropriately match the current local renewable energy supply.

STL Data Centre and Solutions 

At STL, we’ve helped several companies achieve digital transformation by way of our cutting-edge solutions. We have a fully 5G-ready digital network solution designed to aid telecommunication companies, cloud organisations, a fully 5G-ready digital network, and discerning large enterprises to deliver enhanced experiences to our customers. We provide integrated 5G-ready, end-to-end solutions through core capabilities in Optical Interconnect, Virtualized Access Solutions, Network Software, and System Integration. We have two software development centres across India and one Data Centre Design Facility in the UK.

FAQs

What is WiFi?

Put simply, WiFi is a technology that uses radio waves to create a wireless network through which devices like mobile phones, computers, printers, etc., connect to the internet. A wireless router is needed to establish a WiFi hotspot that people in its vicinity may use to access internet services. You’re sure to have encountered such a WiFi hotspot in houses, offices, restaurants, etc.

To get a little more technical, WiFi works by enabling a Wireless Local Area Network or WLAN that allows devices connected to it to exchange signals with the internet via a router. The frequencies of these signals are either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz bandwidths. These frequencies are much higher than those transmitted to or by radios, mobile phones, and televisions since WiFi signals need to carry significantly higher amounts of data. The networking standards are variants of 802.11, of which there are several (802.11a, 802.11b, 801.11g, etc.).

What is a Data Center?

A datacentre, sometimes referred to as a server farm, is a centralized physical location housing compute resources (high-end servers), storage (SSD, HDD, Flash, Optical), and networking equipment (routers, switches, firewalls, etc.) for collecting, storing, processing, distributing and allowing access to large amounts of data.

Apart from the IT equipment data center also houses environment controls (airflow, humidity & temperature sensors), server racks, power supplies (backup systems, generators), and cabling systems (ethernet, copper, optical fiber). Initially, data centers were introduced to manage the large influx of service requests and store user-generated data. In contrast, it has now evolved to adopt technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) applications, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data analytics.

There are four main types of data centers:

a) Enterprise data centers – Built, owned, and managed by a company for particular use-cases for their target user set. They are usually built on-site but can also be built away from the company premise.

b) Managed services data centers – Deployed, managed, and monitored by a third-party datacentre service provider for a company. The features and functionality can be accessed by the company using a managed service platform (MSP)

c) Colocation data centers – Consist of one data center owner selling space, power, and cooling to multiple enterprises and hyperscale customers in a specific location. The company focuses entirely on running the compute, storage, and networking equipment while the data centre service provider takes care of the space, power, cooling, security, and IT racks.

d) Cloud data centers- An off-site data centre provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud that stores the data of various enterprises. The data is fragmented and stored at various locations across the internet (i.e. datacentres across the world). This offers enhanced security, scalability, management, reliability, customization, and cost-effectiveness.