Three Ways Colocation Providers Can Show Their Sustainability Smarts
May 25, 2021
By Teri Acuna, Global Account Manager, Panduit
When the pace of life slowed in 2020 as a result of COVID-19 shelter in place mandates, the environment around us we saw meaningful — and positive — change. Now there is collective desire and a growing demand to get back to business without compromising the opportunity we’ve been presented. In fact, sustainable practices are becoming a top-of-mind topic among investors, c-level executives, employees, and customers who want to invest in, run, work for or buy from organizations who are actively committed to operating in a sustainable fashion.
Energy costs related to cooling account for nearly 37% of the overall data center power consumption, and are the fastest rising data center operation expense. This is one reason why many colocation providers are leading the way in sustainable business operations through energy efficiency initiatives. They are using advanced cooling systems that optimize air flow with smart sensors, and some are switching to clean energy to power their facilities in efforts to offset environmental impact.
As a result of the rise of hybrid cloud architectures inside colocation facilities, more organizations have an opportunity to migrate some or all application workloads to them, and thus reduce their own carbon footprint. For colocation providers, attracting and retaining sustainability-focused tenants means not only operating in a sustainable manner but also publicly sharing sustainability goals and results.
Here are three strategies to consider in order to show your sustainability smarts:
- Many organizations participate in in voluntary sustainability reporting frameworks such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). This is an effective way to determine what data to track and how, as well as providing results in a manner that is consistent with what tenants are seeing.
- Curate or create content explaining how hybrid cloud frameworks enable repurposing of unbalanced resources in data centers lead to unusable power, space, cooling and connectivity, creating high and unnecessary energy costs.
- Take advantage of innovations in wireless monitoring and cooling products like Panduit SynapSense Wireless Monitoring and Cooling Control Solution, which helps operators gain control over unpredictable environmental conditions and capacity challenges. SynapSense optimizes cooling capacity through turnkey intelligent software and wireless nodes and reduce cooling energy use by up to 50%.
