Until a decade ago, companies hosted servers on their own premises, while the vast majority of individuals kept their digital data on their microcomputer at the local level. But today, professionals and individuals can take advantage of data centers to store their digital data safely and outside their own offices. A data center is a physical space – a single room or an entire building – that houses a large number of servers. Many data centers can now accommodate thousands of servers. It is estimated that data centers will be able to store 4 times as much digital data by 2021. This strong development of data centers is driven in particular by Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing is a recent digital practice that allows access to digital data stored on remote servers via the Internet, from wherever you are: at home, at work, on holiday…
Data Centers: how to reduce their impact on ecology?
According to statistics, while digital in general consumed about 10% of the world’s electricity production in 2015, data centers used 18%. In France, data center electricity consumption was 3 TWh, which is equivalent to more than the electricity consumption of the city of Lyon. Because of the joule effect – the dissipation of electricity in the form of heat – air conditioning accounts for nearly half of a data center’s electricity consumption. In order to reduce their electricity consumption and also reduce their environmental impact, some data centers prefer free cooling, i.e. natural cooling based on fresh outside air. Facebook, for example, has chosen to set up one of these data centers in Sweden, specifically in Luleå where the average annual temperature is 1.4°C. It is also possible to recover the heat produced by recovering it for district heating. In France, a public swimming pool in Paris, a student residence in Grenoble and the Val d’Europe business district already use this heating system.
In addition to data centers, terminals (computers, tablets, smartphones, etc.) and the Internet are also very energy-intensive. In 2015, it was found that terminals were twice as energy intensive as data centers. As far as the network was concerned, 4G consumed up to 23 times more than WiFi. To reduce energy consumption related to terminals and networks, the solution lies in individual awareness and responsible behaviour on the part of everyone.
About DATA4 Group
Are you looking for a data center operator in Europe? DATA4 Group offers you around 15 data centers in France, Italy and Luxembourg. We provide you with an area of no less than 121 Ha and electrical resources of 146 MW to support your growth on the continent. Whether you are a company, a digital service provider or a cloud operator, we have the solution!
To store your data, we offer you agile, scalable, secure, high-performance solutions that are also environmentally friendly. According to your needs, we offer you personalized services ranging from a simple bay to a dedicated building.
DATA4 Group also helps you to set up hybrid IT environments in a secure and efficient way thanks to its service platform: the “D4 Digital Hub”. We also offer you the possibility of direct and private access to more than 200 telecom operators, and cloud destinations, to the main Internet exchange nodes in Europe and to other partner services such as storage on demand or HPC (High Performance Computing).
