Environmentally friendly businesses (green) make sure they minimize waste and overproduction. Limit the overcapacity of products to avoid pollution as a side effect of producing equipment and materials. As a data center, to guarantee uptime using spares and redundant paths are the best practice. How can promising uptime fit in a green strategy?

Promising uptime and having valuable SLA levels are key for a data center. Without proper uptime guarantees, there is no right to exist. Therefore, a data center needs equipment as a failsafe in case emergencies and mistakes happen. Also, failsafe’s must be implemented to let a data center operate during extreme circumstances, like the weather and influences of other subjects. What considerations must be made when uniting a green environment and ensuring uptime?

Redundancy levels

The redundancy level is the most obvious characteristic to take a look at when discussing waste since you can consider a setup like 2N, N+1, 2N+1 etcetera. When creating the design, the modularity of your building process can be relevant to its impact on the environment. Think about a generator, the more unused capacity you have on-site, the more waste you have since the machine will use oil, must be tested with fuel etcetera. It’s almost the same for every aspect in a data center, batteries are not known for being eco-friendly. Also, it is important keeping in mind that technologies will improve and the production impact on the environment (and probably their operating impact on the environment). Modularity is mostly key for these decisions to be made. Less is more, instead of more is best for all the failsafe’s it covers. Probably there is a reason why uptime institute does not prescribe a redundancy level but prescribes uptime that is covered by risk mitigations.

Operating efficiency

Besides redundancy levels, it is very important to let your equipment have as less waste as possible during operation. Losses in electricity due to transportation and resistance, or energy in general due to transformation or transportation, means that energy was wasted that is not used for a relevant purpose. Think about evaporation in front of cooling machines when half of the damp is blown away in the air. Choosing highly efficient systems that use the energy they consume almost fully for the designated purpose of its output is a struggle, certainly, when keeping in mind it must be designed with the ability to handle extreme circumstances.

By offering a sustainable business and promise appropriate SLA levels, a data center must be really smart during the design phase. It’s not easy being green and, of course, concessions must be made.