In Depth

In Depth

Datacentre cooling infrastructure

• Why the devil’s still in the detail in the race for energy efficiency

  Energy-efficiency credentials are surely a step in the right direction, but cloud and datacentre providers must look at the sustainability equation from all angles  Continue Reading

• IT sustainability strategies: Why enterprises need to start with the datacentre when going green

  Enterprises are under pressure to curb their carbon emissions and become more environmentally friendly entities on multiple fronts, including in the datacentre  Continue Reading

• Carbon copies: How to stop data retention from killing the planet

  Our society has a serious digital hoarding problem, which is coming at a cost to the environment. But what can be done to address it?  Continue Reading

• Burning up: Mitigation should sustain datacentre operations during extreme heat

  July’s temperature spike put headline heat on regional operations at Google and Oracle. Datacentre operators must side-step similar mistakes to avoid climate change-related collapse in future  Continue Reading

• Icelandic datacentres may lead the way to green IT

  Iceland may soon become even more attractive to companies wanting to minimise their carbon footprint while using high-performance computing services  Continue Reading

• IT departments need holistic circular economies to fight climate change

  With sustainability moving up the boardroom agenda, IT managers should revamp procurement strategies to align with the principles of the circular economy, but what does this mean for managing the IT lifecycle?  Continue Reading

• Weighing up the nuclear option for powering datacentres

  Resourcing energy-hungry IT through the race to reduce carbon emissions means looking objectively at all the options, including nuclear power  Continue Reading

• Datacentres and climate change: Operators accused of being all talk and no action on sustainability

  Datacentre operators talk a good fight when it comes to tackling climate change, but there is far more they should and could be doing to make their operations more sustainable, say experts  Continue Reading

• Decarbonising datacentres: Turning the hot air about heat reuse into real-life use cases

  Reusing waste heat from datacentres to warm local businesses and homes could bring about considerable reductions in carbon emissions and lower energy costs, so what needs to happen to make this a more widespread practice?  Continue Reading

• How to beat the heat: What can datacentre operators do to meet emissions targets?

  With new mandates around sustainability proliferating, datacentres must find ways to meet their environmental goals while remaining competitive and meeting customer service-level expectations  Continue Reading

• Riskier business: How Brexit could be changing downtime risk and resilience in the datacentre

  As the UK enters the final quarter of its first year from the Brexit transition period, the risk picture for local datacentres remains unclear  Continue Reading

• Could Iceland be the best place in the world for high-performance computing?

  Most of Iceland’s cheap, sustainable energy is currently used by aluminium smelters, but recognising the need to diversify, the Landsvirkjun power company now promotes other uses  Continue Reading

• The second coming: The Nordic datacentre market comes of age

  As concerns mount about space and power constraints within several of Europe’s largest datacentre hubs, enterprises are being urged to consider shifting more of their energy-intensive workloads to the Nordic countries  Continue Reading

• APAC datacentres gear up for the future

  Datacentre operators in the Asia-Pacific region are dabbling in advanced power and cooling solutions, along with machine learning and edge computing, to keep pace with growing demand for their services  Continue Reading

• Dublin in distress: Power supply issues threaten growth of Europe’s second-biggest datacentre hub

  Dublin’s standing as Europe’s second-biggest datacentre hub could be on potentially shaky ground as Ireland’s electricity infrastructure creaks under the pressure of so many power-hungry server farms plugging into the national grid  Continue Reading

• Nautilus Data Technologies CEO on building waterborne datacentres in the name of sustainability

  James Connaughton, CEO of waterborne datacentre design champion Nautilus Data Technologies, sets out why the firm is convinced that water-cooled facilities are the answer to the tech industry’s sustainability woes  Continue Reading

• The National Security and Investment Act: What datacentre operators and investors need to know

  The incoming National Security and Investment Act will give the UK government enhanced powers to pre-screen and intervene on datacentre M&A deals, prompting concerns it could dampen the sector's soaraway growth rates  Continue Reading

• NHS datacentre transformation projects continue apace during pandemic

  NHS trusts have continued to invest in their datacentre estates throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, but the nature of their upgrade projects continues to evolve  Continue Reading

• The end is nigh: Are datacentre operators prepared for a potential no-deal Brexit?

  Datacentre operations are resilient and forward-thinking by nature, yet pitfalls and cost impacts are looming large with a potential no-deal Brexit on the horizon  Continue Reading

• How intelligent workload management tools can help IT admins cut through cloud complexity

  IT administrators have to manage an increasingly complex and varied range of application types and IT environments, and intelligent workload management tools offer a helping hand with that  Continue Reading

• The datacentre chill-factor: Finding the right conditions

  Computer Weekly explores a variety of cost-effective, energy-efficient services currently using innovative methods to keep datacentres cool  Continue Reading

• Datacentre liquid cooling: What needs to happen for it to become commonplace in colocation?

  As demand for increasingly dense racks and compute-heavy workloads increases within datacentres, could this lead to a wholesale shift in preference from air-to-liquid-based cooling systems? If so, at what cost to the environment?  Continue Reading

• Lean, mean and green: The datacentres of the future

  Working out how to develop more efficient datacentres in an increasingly resource-hungry world is not easy, but it is possible  Continue Reading

• Datacentres operators must move away from diesel backup generators to give back to grid

  While the diesel backup generators used by datacentre operators have a limited environmental impact, using them for extended periods of time to power sites to feed energy back into the grid is not a sustainable solution to growing electricity demand  Continue Reading

• Driving adoption: Are high costs putting public cloud out of reach to non-profits?

  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s insights into the sky-high cloud bills faced by some non-profit organisations prompts questions about whether the public cloud giants should do more to make their services more accessible to the third sector  Continue Reading

• From consumer to prosumer: Reducing the datacentre industry’s reliance on the national grid

  With the government ramping up plans to go net zero on carbon emissions by 2050, where does the datacentre industry stand – and how can it become more sustainable over the coming years?  Continue Reading

• Unpicking the datacentre industry’s complicated relationship with climate change

  The energy usage habits of datacentres often see the sector labelled as a contributor to climate change, but the situation is far more nuanced than that, it seems  Continue Reading

• Log management: Helping IT admins to achieve infrastructure-wide visibility

  When properly configured and deployed, log management tools can unearth a veritable treasure trove of data that IT administrators can use to triage and diagnose problems in enterprise IT infrastructures  Continue Reading

• Evolution in action: The changing face of the datacentre

  The role datacentres play in the wider enterprise IT landscape is changing, fuelling the demand for a mix of different types of facilities that are capable of meeting the growing variety of enterprise data-processing requirements  Continue Reading

• Datacentre cooling upgrades: Helping operators decide where best to invest

  Upgrading a datacentre cooling system is an expensive undertaking, but should operators stick with what they've always done or try something new?  Continue Reading

• Datacentre heat reuse: Why aren’t more operators doing it?

  With the datacentre industry’s sustainability habits coming under increasingly close scrutiny, we find out why operators are not rushing to reuse their waste heat  Continue Reading

• Microsoft’s underwater datacentre: The pros and cons of running subsea facilities

  Underwater datacentres can help providers save on land costs and cooling, but at what cost to the environment?  Continue Reading

• Datacentre PUE: Who's keeping score?

  With datacentre operators under increased competitive pressure to cut their PUE scores, are their ratings really all they seem?  Continue Reading

• Energy-efficient Europe: How the datacentre sector is keeping it clean

  With users becoming increasingly savvy about environmental issues, we take a look at how the datacentre sector is responding  Continue Reading

• The UK’s problem with power

  Datacentre power buyers say Britain’s deregulated energy market is as complex as trading in derivatives  Continue Reading

• How Capgemini keeps its Merlin datacentre green and energy-efficient

  Capgemini's Swindon-based Merlin datacentre is one of the most energy-efficient in the world. But what makes it green?  Continue Reading

• Top technologies that can make your datacentre green

  Energy-efficient technologies that can reduce running costs in the datacentre and across the business  Continue Reading

• How to effectively manage datacentre temperature and humidity

  A datacentre is a complex facility with different cooling equipment and power systems. Here's how to monitor its temperature and humidity  Continue Reading