Sustainability and IT infrastructure - why our data centres do a lot for the environment

What do you think of when you hear "sustainability"? Does the area of IT infrastructure come to your mind first? Probably not. Especially in this area there is a lot of potential to give a company a sustainable orientation. KTR has already been proving for a decade how this can be implemented.

Cooling by a power-operated cooling system can account for up to 70% of a data center's total energy demand. The ever-increasing computing power of such data centres also increases the heat generated in these rooms. Up to 100% of the energy consumed by the hardware is converted into heat. Heat and hardware, however, do not get along. If nothing is done against the heat, it can lead to hardware failure. For this reason, sufficient cooling is very important, but can lead to very high energy consumption. 

 

Free cooling for sustainable data centres

In Germany, the outdoor temperatures in the warm months are usually around 20 degrees. This is exactly what we can use as an advantage, so that we don't have to use electricity for our cooling. With the help of a so-called free cooling system, the outside air becomes the cooling source for our data centres. For this purpose, the air is fed through a filter system into the data centres and finally cools them down to a desired temperature. A power-operated cooling system only steps in as a backup if the defined limits for temperature, humidity or air quality have been exceeded. By using this type of cooling, we manage to save 85% energy.

Control is everything – the PUE as a reference

At any time we can quantify the efficiency of our two sustainable data centres by using a technical indicator. This technical indicator is called Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). The PUE of our data centres amounts to 1,2. This value is considered very efficient in practice, because it means that only 20% more energy is consumed than the devices in the data centre, such as servers, can absorb. The average PUE value in the market is 2,0.

By using free cooling, we have been able to contribute to sustainable action for years. In this way we save approximately 160 tons of CO2 annually through our energy-efficient data centres.