Last week, Google hosted an “Efficient Data Center Summit” with leaders from the IT sector to discuss best practices for improving data center efficiency, whole also saving money. Here’s what Google had to say in its blog post about the summit:
“Saving electricity and water is not just good for the environment, it makes good business sense too. Being ‘green’ reduces operating costs and can keep our industry competitive; it is the economic advantage that makes efficiency truly sustainable.”
Google has a pretty interesting set of slides about how to maintain sustainable data centers. The slides say that e-waste is a growing problem and the best practices to combat this are the 4 R’s: 4 R’s: Reduce, reuse, repair, recycle. Google says that 68% of the company’s retired server material is re-purposed (internally or externally). Google also highlighted water management as data centers as another part of the sustainability solution. Google says that currently two of the company’s data centers are 100% self-sufficient for process cooling water by utilizing treated waste water. They expect that by the end of 2010, Google will be 80% self-sufficient for all of their data center water consumption. Google also said that they have been able to reduce their data facility energy use by 85%.
Google’s initiative is pretty cool and it’s especially great that they are taking the lead to spread the word about the benefits of green, efficient data centers. As Google states, being sustainable and efficient in data operations not only is good for the Earth but it also saves money for IT businesses.
Here’s a video tour of the data center: