Data Centers: The Greenprint for Better Energy Efficiency
Leverage the virtual twin experience to optimize all sustainable data center innovation strategies and achieve energy-efficient outcomes.
Why is Data Center Optimization Essential?
Data center optimization is crucial for several reasons. It improves energy efficiency, reducing electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, which lowers operational costs and minimizes environmental impact. By optimizing resources, companies also achieve significant cost reductions, including savings on power, cooling, and maintenance.
It ensures peak performance, enabling data centers to operate with minimal downtime and maximum efficiency, crucial for business continuity. Optimized data centers can scale efficiently to meet growing demands, such as:
- comply with environmental regulations,
- support sustainability goals,
- enhance security,
- provide a competitive advantage by offering faster, more reliable services.
Reducing the Environmental Impact of Data Centers with Energy-Efficient Solutions
As the world becomes increasingly digital, the growth of data centers and data processing continues, resulting in a staggering projected data creation of 175 zettabytes1 by 2025. However, with this growth comes a significant environmental impact as energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) continue to rise. Data centers account for around 1.5% of global electricity use and 1% of energy-related GHG emissions2.
To mitigate this impact, data center owner-operators, contractors, and builders must adopt renewable energy sources and energy-efficient equipment to reduce their carbon footprint and waste. By leveraging the virtual twin experience on the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform, stakeholders can develop and operate more energy-saving and environmentally friendly data centers.
Discover how to bring these data centers to life below.
Virtual Twins Boosting Data Center Efficiency
Leveraging Advanced Technology to Marry Data Center Performance and Sustainability.
Key Benefits of Data Center Energy Management
Reduced Energy Consumption
Optimization leads to more efficient use of energy, significantly lowering electricity costs and reducing the environmental impact of data centers.
Resource Efficiency
Optimization maximizes the use of existing resources, reducing waste and extending the lifespan of data center equipment.
Regulatory Compliance
Optimized data centers are better positioned to meet environmental regulations and sustainability standards, helping businesses avoid fines and penalties.
Cost Savings
By improving energy efficiency and optimizing resources, businesses can reduce operational expenses, including power, cooling, and maintenance costs.
Enhanced Performance
Optimized data centers run at peak performance, ensuring maximum uptime, faster processing, and more reliable access to data and applications.
Scalability
Optimization allows data centers to scale efficiently, accommodating growth in data processing demands without requiring excessive increases in energy usage or physical space.
Increased Security
Optimization often involves upgrading infrastructure and implementing advanced security measures, reducing the risk of data breaches and ensuring data integrity.
Competitive Advantage
Companies that optimize their data centers can deliver faster, more reliable services, providing a competitive edge in the market.
Energy-efficient Data Centers: Three Key Development Areas
Here are three ways the virtual twin experience and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform can optimize sustainable data center development.
1. Engineering and IT Efficiency Management
To evaluate and manage engineering and IT efficiency in data centers, stakeholders must work on power use effectiveness (PUE). To do so, they must first:
a. Optimize the energy efficiency of cooling systems with engineering efficiency
Stakeholders can leverage the virtual twin experience to model and simulate compute systems, not to mention their energy supply and cooling infrastructure. This way, they can maximize energy efficiency through improved heat, liquid, cooling water and airflow management.
b. Effectively reduce IT equipment's energy consumption
It is easier to increase IT equipment's performance while reducing energy consumption – with IT efficiency powered by Dassault Systèmes' virtual twin experiences and IBM's asset management, IoT platform and environmental intelligence suite.
2. Sustainable construction
With complete supply chain visibility on a common collaboration platform, stakeholders can deploy a sustainable construction strategy that includes generative design, systems performance analysis, efficient transportation and logistics, and waste management.
Curious about how it all works? Explore a virtual twin-powered, four-step sustainable construction plan in the infographic below.
3. Modularity
On the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, owner-operators can easily define, design and manufacture data center modules off-site before on-site installation. As such, they can increase the quality of these modules while reducing installation waste and errors.
Owner-operators can also leverage the platform's systems engineering and simulation capabilities to deliver multiple design alternatives with efficient and sustainable configurations.
Innovative Solutions for High-Performance & Next-Gen Data Centers
1Source: “World Energy Transitions” by Irena
2Source: “Global Hydrogen Review 2022” by IEA
Frequently Asked Questions About Data Center Optimization Strategies
A green data center minimizes environmental impact by using energy-efficient technologies, renewable energy sources, and sustainable cooling systems. It also implements waste reduction strategies and focuses on energy optimization to lower carbon emissions.
While traditional data centers are energy-intensive, many modern data centers are adopting sustainable practices to reduce their environmental footprint. Green data centers prioritize energy efficiency, utilize renewable power, and adopt cooling innovations to become more eco-friendly.
- Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE): Measures how efficiently a data center uses energy, with a lower PUE indicating better energy efficiency.
- Carbon Emissions: Tracks the amount of CO2 produced, reflecting the environmental impact of operations.
- Renewable Energy Use: The percentage of energy sourced from renewable power.
- Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE): Assesses the efficiency of water use, especially for cooling.
- E-waste Management: Monitors the disposal and recycling of electronic equipment to minimize waste.
Dynamic optimization in a data center refers to the real-time, automated adjustment of resources to maximize performance while minimizing energy consumption, aligning with sustainability goals. It involves managing workloads, balancing server loads, and optimizing energy use by scaling power to current needs. Through AI and machine learning, this process reduces carbon footprints, lowers operational costs, and improves efficiency, ensuring that data centers run sustainably and adapt to fluctuating demands with minimal environmental impact.
Optimizing data centers for sustainability presents challenges like managing energy consumption, reducing carbon emissions, and improving cooling efficiency. Balancing these factors while ensuring high availability and scalability requires innovation in renewable energy integration, resource virtualization, and intelligent power distribution. Additionally, optimizing storage capacity and network performance while minimizing environmental impact is essential for creating eco-friendly, high-performing data centers.
- Compute Resources: Energy-efficient servers and storage systems that minimize power usage while processing and storing data.
- Networking: Optimized routers and switches that manage data flow efficiently with reduced energy consumption.
- Power and Cooling: Systems that use sustainable energy and cooling solutions to maintain optimal temperatures, reducing environmental impact.
Additionally, cloud computing reduces on-premises infrastructure, physical space consolidation improves energy use, and virtualization enhances resource efficiency while reducing operational costs.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is a key federal agency that assists the President in overseeing the federal budget and supervises its administration across executive branch agencies. It also develops and enforces government-wide policies in areas like financial management and IT.
The Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) is an OMB-led program aimed at improving the efficiency, performance, and security of federal data centers.
- Data Center Consolidation: Reduce the number of physical data centers to lower costs and increase efficiency by closing underutilized facilities.
- Energy Efficiency: Enhance energy performance of remaining data centers using metrics like Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).
- Cloud Adoption: Promote the use of cloud computing to provide scalable, secure, and cost-effective data storage and processing.
- Improved Security: Ensure optimized data centers meet high cybersecurity standards to protect government data.
- Cost Savings: Achieve significant cost reductions by minimizing the physical and energy footprint of data centers.
- Reporting and Accountability: Mandate agencies to report progress on meeting DCOI goals, ensuring transparency and accountability.
Related Content
Decarbonizing Industry Operations
Through digital transformation, industries can rethink their operations, from product design to supply chains, and move toward more sustainable, resource-efficient processes.
Green Steel: Can We Make Heavy Industry Have a Lighter Impact?
Steel is one of the most polluting industries in the world. With a combination of hydrogen-based manufacturing techniques and overall process optimizations, we can work to change that.
Sustainable Production
Achieve low-carbon production and reduce pollution and energy consumption by implementing sustainable solutions throughout your operations and your supply chain.