The next stage in data centre development is to understand its associated environmental costs and implement appropriate technological solutions to prevent such costs, according to Hitachi Data Systems’ CTO.
Speaking to Computerworld Australia, Hubert Yoshida said environmental costs are top-of-mind for him and other CTOs.
“In countries like Thailand, they've told me that [for] every watt that goes into powering the data centre, it takes one and a half watts to cool it because of the humidity,” he said.
“In Australia it may be a bit different because coal is your main energy source, but that presents another problem in that coal isn’t very carbon friendly.”
As well as understanding the environmental impact data centres are having, Yoshida said technology can be used to prevent such an impact.
“The big thing in data centres is the tremendous need to reduce power and cooling,” he said.
“The three things that do this are having the form factor disks, virtualisation to make better use of it, and then tiering where you can use high density disks for the majority of data.”
Yoshida also said knowing when to rebuild data centres is also important, as older facilities sometimes fail to keep up with new technology.
“People are beginning to realise that data centres built 10 or 20 years ago during the dotcom boom are running out of steam to support the new technologies we have,” he said.
“eBay built a data centre that came online last May and by using new technologies, we’re able to reduce their data centre costs by 50 per cent.”
Yoshida’s insights into the future of the data centre come as Hitachi Data Systems last year announced its intention to move into the South Australian data centre market by opening an office in Adelaide this year.
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