Navigation: Minimum Sustainable Recommendations | What are the Issues? | What are the Options? |
Did you know……”Observers have noted that the massive migration of IT workloads to cloud is the third or fourth major disruptive shift in the history of computing, equaling in some ways the major disruption caused by the advent of the World Wide Web.” The Business of Federal technology, Michael Garland,2018.
To support low carbon and sustainable cloud services, the vendor must provide environmental information for each data/server center associated with the portfolio of data/server center proposed for the cloud services. These requirements also extend to the cloud service provider vendors (sub-contractors):
PUE (Power Utilization Effectiveness): A metric used to measure the energy efficiency of data centers. It is calculated by the total energy consumption of the data center divided by the energy consumption of the IT equipment within it (servers, networking, and storage).
WUE (Water Utilization Effectiveness): A metric that measures the amount of water used by data centers to cool and regulate the humidity of the facility. It is calculated by dividing the facility’s annual water usage (in liters) by the annual energy consumption (in kilowatt hours) of the IT equipment inside it. Show preference to data centers with low WUE. According to a 2020 US Department of Energy report, the WUE of an average data center is 1.8L per 1kWh. Data centers with a WUE of 0.2 L/kWh or less use less than one cup of water for every kilowatt-hour delivered to servers.
CUE (Carbon Use Effectiveness): The GHG emissions from data energy consumption are calculated by multiplying the data center’s electricity use total by the GHG emission factor of the electric utility provider or regional electricity grid system. The CUE’s ideal value is zero (a zero carbon data center); CUE does not have a theoretical upper bound.
Both CUE and PUE simply cover the operations of the data center. They do not cover the full environmental burden of the life-cycle of the data center and ICT equipment. Currently CUE is specifically limited to GHG Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions.
Other things to consider
Purchasers can maximize the GHG/environmental performance by allocating a greater portion of scoring points to any or all of the proposed metrics mentioned above. To support Manitoba’s Low Carbon Government Office, consider giving CUE a high percentage of evaluation points when evaluating the bid responses to show preference for low carbon energy sources.
In the pre-cloud era, organizations in Manitoba managed the environmental impacts and carbon emissions associated with their on-premise data center through the proper selection and utilization of server and software equipment as well as proper equipment maintenance and data center cooling techniques. Use of hydroelectricity, a low carbon power source, and mandated requirements to manage end-of-life electronics through licensed electronic recyclers resulted in on-premise data/server centers with low carbon footprints in our province.
The days of local governments and businesses owning server equipment to meet their Information and Communications Technology (ICT) requirements (e.g. data storage/transfer, running business applications, etc.) are becoming a thing of the past. Most entities now meet most of their ICT capacity by purchasing “cloud” services – meaning the data/server equipment needed for ICT requirements are managed and hosted offsite by a third-party. The cloud model essentially takes traditional IT products, fractionalizes them and rents them out as a service to numerous customers on a pay as you go basis. Data centers associated with cloud services are often bigger than a football field and house endless stacks of servers handling many terabytes (thousands of gigabytes) of digital traffic.
While there are numerous benefits associated with the use of cloud services (such as cost efficiency, enhanced security and rapid scalability of data storage needs), outsourcing data storage removes control of the environmental impacts associated with purchasing a physical commodity. Energy use and GHG emissions of a data/server centers are directly related to:
Energy consumption and the associated emissions are regarded as critical concerns by data center operators and data service purchasers. Many data centers use energy derived from coal and/or natural gas. Data centers also require huge amounts of water to operate, mostly for cooling. The fast expansion of data centers is leaving significant water footprints and challenges, especially in areas with a rapidly depleting groundwater supply.
The challenge for government procurement is what type of metrics can be requested in a bid document to support low carbon and sustainable cloud services.
The procurement goal is to select services with a low environmental footprint. Data center owners, designers, engineers and managers are aware of the environmental issues and more specifically the carbon emissions and water use issues associated with the cloud services they offer.
Engineers and designers are now building data centers with efficiency in mind to reduce their carbon footprint. For example, data centers are now able to efficiently operate at higher running temperatures, reducing energy usage related to cooling. Data Center Managers are also employing full lifecycle strategies to support embodied carbon management. Strategies to extend the life of the equipment, such as virtualization and tiering the use of server equipment are being employed. These activities help to maximize the sustainability of the service requested.
Many cloud service providers have made a commitment to clean energy and are transitioning from coal/natural gas to renewable sources. In addition to reducing GHG emissions, many are locating and designing data centers with an effort to reduce water consumption. Efforts include:
There are a variety of standards and metrics an organization can request in bid documents to help identify and compare energy consumption, GHG emissions, and water consumption impacts associated with vendor offerings. Purchasers can maximize the GHG/environmental performance by allocating a greater portion of scoring points to any or all of the proposed metrics defined under Minimum Sustainable Recommendations (above).
Resources:
Computer Weekly: How to Reduce your Data Centre CO2 Emissions
Last updated: March 2021
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