Though often hidden from public sight, data centers are pivotal in today’s technology-driven age. They play a crucial role in maintaining the facility of systems that drive everything from computer systems to the Internet.

Yet, data centers face scrutiny for their significant energy consumption and environmental impact, challenging their efficiency in managing digital systems. To tackle these problems, a system of sustainable data centers has been designed as an effective way to keep and maintain digital systems.

This article will review the key principles for sustainable data center development and their contribution to reducing energy consumption and keeping and maintaining digital systems effectively.

Sustainable Data Center And Key Principle For Their development

Sustainable data center development is a modern approach to creating and operating data centers with minimum environmental impact and maximum efficiency. This approach considers every aspect of data centers, such as longevity, design, construction, operation, etc.

Here are the key principles for the development of sustainable data centers:

1. Energy Conservation and Design Optimization

One of the main issues with data centers is that they consume a considerable amount of energy to run their operations. However, sustainable data center developments focus on building facilities with enhanced energy efficiency.

Utilizing renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and hydropower, combined with optimizing components and designs—including cooling systems—sustainable data centers help organizations reduce energy use and their environmental carbon footprint.

Furthermore, sustainable data centers prioritize water conservation by using technologies and systems to filter and recycle used water in the facility.

Additionally, while data centers produce considerable heat, sustainable ones aim to capture and redirect this heat to areas where cooling is required, enhancing their overall energy efficiency.

2. Efficient Resource utilization

Sustainable data center developments also rely on using resources efficiently by using technologies such as server virtualization, network virtualization, and storage virtualization.

Server virtualization is a technique that allows multiple servers to run on a single hardware device. By reducing the number of hardware components for each system, server virtualization reduces the number of devices and saves energy.

On the other hand, storage virtualization stores resources from various devices in a single location, therefore allowing significant resources to be managed and reducing the number of storage units.

3. Green Building Practices

The development of sustainable data centers prioritizes adherence to green building practices by choosing efficient- materials and design, such as eco-friendly materials, natural and energy-efficient lighting, and optimized layouts for data centers that will promote natural ventilation and reduced energy cost.

For green building compliance, development chooses materials with low footprints and durable insulation materials that are eco-friendly and effective for temperature regulation.

In terms of design and layout, development aims to position the facility in a direction ( orientation) where it can harness natural resources to its advantage. It also deals with the facility’s inward layout to arrange equipment in an efficient arrangement to minimize gaps and save space in the facility.

4. Scalability and Future-Proofing

Scalability and future adjustment are key principles for sustainable data center developments. This involves designing and constructing facilities to support digital systems’ future growth and expansion without significantly reconstructing data centers.

Technology is constantly changing, and so are the systems to operate them. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to consider, assess, and evaluate futuristic changes to be able to develop sustainable data centers to support further digital systems.

5. Monitoring and Optimization

Continuous inspections and evaluation of various data center systems, their components, and processes, and if needed, readjustments and improvements are vital to save energy, reduce environmental effects, and lower heat and water waste.

Monitoring data centers involves observing real-time developments, identifying inefficiencies in processes and their components, keeping track of energy usage, evaluating the intensity of environmental impact, etc.

6. Green Certification

To operate data centers legally requires compliance with environmental standards and certifications, such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method).

LEED and BREEAM are the two most prominent and world-recognized green building certification programs. These two programs provide the best systems to evaluate and grade the sustainability of data centers.

Importance of Sustainable Data Center Development

Here are why building sustainable and eco-friendly data centers are being considered a priority:

1. Environmentally- Friendly

Sustainable data center developments comply with environmental standards and emphasize addressing global climate issues, such as climate change, environmental footprint, depletion of natural resources, etc.

2. Cost Saving

Sustainable data center developments are designed to operate efficiently. They are also optimized for energy efficiency, renewable energy adoption, long-term sustainability, etc.

3. Adaptive

Sustainable data centers also consider supporting and maintaining futuristic requirements, such as technological changes, protection, etc, inside the facilities without requiring major reconstruction and expansion of data centers.

Final Note

All in all, sustainable data center development is a modern, sensible version of a traditional data center. Owing to its many advantages, it is being widely regarded as the best option to maintain digital systems as energy-efficient, cost-efficient, and eco-friendly.

As much as sustainable data center development is effective, it requires expertise and experience to take proper shape.

Mechartes provides engineering services for data centers. We are equipped with advanced tools like CFD to help organizations build forward-looking data centers emphasizing energy and resource conservation. We have already successfully helped our clients worldwide with their data centers.

Mechartes is also a leading expert in providing CFD and FEA simulation solutions for a variety of domains, such as oil, power, gas, hydro and chemical plants, construction, and more.