DCD Zero Downtime: The Bi-Weekly Data Center Show

Figures quoted in 2021 suggested that data centers and communications technology could use eight percent or even 20 percent of the world's electricity by 2030. That seemed too high to us, so we tracked down the original source of the quotes, only to find he feels the same way.  Anders Andrae is an academic, currently working at Huawei's Swedish R&D center. Since his original 2015 paper he has revised his predictions down, but the old figures still often show up out of context.  More importantly, he thinks we should be looking at the benefits of IT as well as the energy cost. He talks of a "handprint" that counter-balances the environmental "footprint".  Andrae says the Internet saves far more emissions, through offering a digital alternative to physical services, than it consumes. You can find Andrae's research here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anders-Andrae

Data centers are about as efficient as they ever can be, in terms of delivering power to servers and keeping them cool, so what's the next step to sustainable digital infrastructure?  There is a lot of talk about reusing the wasted heat that facilities produce, but this seems like a hard job when all too often they can't give it away for free. Max Schulze is the founder of the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA), a group of stakeholders aiming to achieve a sustainable digital infrastructure by 2030. He thinks the answer to heat reuse is economics, not engineering. And when we've sorted that out, he foresees that the big cloud providers will be disaggregated, and the cloud will become the same kind of market as the electricity grid.

In the first episode of the Zero Downtime podcast, we sit down with Lex Coors, winner of DCD's 2021 Outstanding Contribution to the Industry award and Chief Data Center Technology & Engineering Officer for Interxion. We spoke to Lex about his two decades at the company, from the early days, to the rise of cloud, and the recent Digital Realty acquisition. We also discussed sustainability efforts, the European energy crisis, and how to ensure that local communities don't turn against data centers.