Sustaining Data Centre Through Green Practices

At its simplest, a data centre is a physical facility that organisations use to house their critical applications and data.

A data centre's design is based on a network of computing and storage resources that enable the delivery of shared applications and data.

The key components of a data centre design include routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers, and application-delivery controllers.

Beyond the core IT infrastructure of data centres, it also comprises facilities like the power supply system (generators, transformers, batteries, UPS, etc.), oil, fuel, and diesel storage facilities, and the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. 

A holistic analysis of the traditional data centre system will reveal a host of climate change show stoppers that can have huge impacts on the environment if green options for the data center system are not adopted.

Speaking in an event last November 2022, the Group Chief Executive Officer of Tier III Carrier and Cloud neutral data centre in Jasper Lankhorst restated the company’s commitment to the green economy even as it vowed to continually enhance its drive for sustainability in its operations.

Lankhorst made this known during last year's AfricaCom/Africa Tech Festival in Cape Town, South Africa.   

Speaking during the panel session, themed: “The Importance of Going Green,” for the future of Data Centres in Africa, he explained that Rack Centre, part of the pan-African data center platform, was undertaking a range of measures that are tailored toward green design principles, some of which include switching from diesel to gas power generation,  implementing water-efficient cooling systems, implementing low-energy air circulation system and sourcing local materials and services wherever possible.
  
According to him, the organisation is switching its power source from diesel to gas, not only to save more than $10 million a year in operating costs but also to reduce carbon footprint, reduce environmental impact and align with global sustainability data center design trends.
 
“As a result of these moves, Rack Centre is forecasted to be 35 per cent more energy-efficient than other regional data centre, and 16 per cent more energy-efficient than the global average.

"It will reduce water consumption by 41 percent, and there will be a 45 per cent saving in embodied energy in materials used,” he said.

He further noted that though customers are demanding a sustainable strategy for the business, hence, the choice of going green, though capital-intensive, should be sustainable.

 They must be as energy efficient as possible and use reliable, low-carbon sources of power to ensure uninterrupted operations, which is in line with the organization’s prime aim to provide 100 per cent uptime.

“In addition to the existing Rack Centre LGS 1 data center in Lagos, which supports 1.5MW of IT power, our campus is now being expanded with a new building, the LGS 2 facility which supports 12MW of IT power.

"This provides a total IT power of 13.5MW in the Nigeria campus, built using modern, efficient, and green design architecture.

"We have a principle known as KIA – Keep In Africa, and it’s a philosophy we use in our design and the procurement process to make it sustainable with the availability of local knowledge and local skills to be able to build and operate it,” he added.