The Growth of Data Centre Power and Water Consumption
The data centre industry is growing rapidly as more and more applications require compute and storage, driving a corresponding rapid increase in energy and water use in data centre facilities.
The advances in chip design and manufacturing that limited server power consumption through the first decade and a half of the 2000s reached their limits in recent years, and a spike in the amount of energy servers use has followed. In a recent report the Uptime Institute cited data from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) that showed server power consumption increasing by 266% since 2017.
Mounting pressures to meet consumer demand for energy and water are forcing governments at all levels to take a harder look at data centres and their outsized consumption of those resources. Data centre power is estimated to be responsible for up to 3% of global electricity consumption today and are projected to touch 4% by 2030. The average hyperscale data centre facility consumes 20-50MW annually – theoretically enough electricity to power up to 37,000 homes.
The data centre industry will continue to take steps to self-monitor and moderate – including an increasing preference for environmentally-friendly thermal designs – but this year will see increases in regulatory oversight. According to a recent Omdia survey, 99% of enterprise data centre operators say prefabricated, modular data centre designs will be a part of their future data centre strategy as they seek the speed and efficiencies standardisation delivers.
After years of relatively static rack densities, data centre operators are increasingly requesting higher-density racks. According to the Uptime Institute’s 2022 Global Data Centre Survey, more than a third of data centre operators say their rack densities have rapidly increased in the past three years.
The aforementioned increases in server power consumption are happening as the need to add capacity quickly is growing, challenging operators from all sides. This leaves them little choice but to explore the boundaries of existing facilities by adding computing in tight spaces, increasing rack densities and creating thermal profiles that require liquid cooling. While liquid cooling is not a new technology, the early wave of successful, efficient, problem-free deployments in high-density environments has provided proof of concept that will boost adoption in the coming year. The addition of direct-to-chip cooling to new OCP and Open19 standards will only accelerate this trend.
Click here for more information about our data centre cooling options. To find out more or to request a quotation, get in touch with Source UPS today!
Call: 01252 692559 or email: info@sourceups.co.uk
We have worked with Source UPS for several years now. We have a large number of rack locations throughout our busy campus, but the service visits are always carried out with out any problems. The team are very accommodating and have made some useful recommendations that we have adopted across our campus network. I would definitely recommend Source UPS.
