Data centres could be more energy efficient and make better use of their infrastructures if existing and emerging smart energy technologies were in greater use, according to the Uptime Institute. A new report, Smart Energy for the Data Centre, claims that the data centre industry will strongly embrace smart energy, but it will “take time”.
The report concludes that smart energy systems promise “greater efficiency and use of capacity, reduced maintenance, more granular control of redundancy, and greater real-time management of resource use”. However, smart energy management for data centres is still in its infancy. Deployment will be slowed and complicated by technical, cultural, organisation, and economic factors.
Uptime Institute argues that smart energy technologies could effectively end the clear physical differentiation between 2N configurations and less-expensive N+1 configurations. UPSs are also expected to become smarter and support more functions. In addition, they will be linked to the grid and cloud services for two-way resource and data sharing.
Ultimately, smart energy systems will play a key role in enabling a variety of power and IT technologies to be optimised in support of an industry-wide, long-term goal to reduce generator use.