While Procurri has spent years talking about sustainability issues in the data center industry and attempting to make them a higher priority amongst IT decision-makers, it has at times seemed as though a losing battle. Against a backdrop of global supply chain shortages, a pandemic and economic tumult worldwide, business survival has long been the primary focus – but now it seems priorities may be changing.
The Global Data Center Survey 2023, commissioned and completed by the Uptime Institute, surveyed almost 900 data center managers across the world for the 13th time. When asked to identify their key management concerns, the top ranked was a sustainability issue: energy efficiency!
Some 33% of respondents indicated that they felt grave concern about the issue, making it the most common worry. Also ranked highly was the worry that procuring equipment when needed would be difficult.
Indeed in the realm of energy efficiency, progress appears to have largely stalled industry-wide. The average annual PUE for data centers has remained at around 1.59/1.58 for the last five years: reflecting to some extent that lots of ‘quick wins’ have already been achieved and that any further work would require major investment and refurbishment work. Modern facilities do appear to perform better in terms of energy efficiency, which is unsurprising, but the potential for disruption as older facilities must move or be upgraded to such standards does mean that progress is likely to stall for a while longer. In many territories, particularly across Europe, skyrocketing electricity costs were also flagged as contributing toward the concern around this issue.
Of course, Procurri’s services don’t directly reduce the energy emissions of data centers, but they can enhance the overall sustainability performance of them, through such initiatives as:
- The extension of data center hardware’s lifecycle through the use of Third Party Maintenance: negating the need for costly and wasteful replacement cycles that simply aren’t necessary
- The use of zero-to-landfill ITAD practices so that when hardware does finally reach the end of its functional life, it can be recycled or refurbished – and provide value back into the business
- Working toward the UN’s Support The Goals sustainability objectives, providing measurable and tangible metrics to help demonstrate customers’ contributions toward collaborative sustainability
- Maintaining a carbon neutral organization status to ensure that customers are able to improve their own Scope 3 sustainability reporting, enhancing their ESG goals through positive association.
What’s more, Procurri’s supply chain for hardware supply is not impacted by otherwise negative external influences because we already hold the world’s largest independent stockholding! With over 500,000 unique parts spanning 50,000 different part numbers across OEM authorized spares and refurbished hardware, there’s not much we don’t already have; but where we don’t, our product experts can source it swiftly.
If you’d like more info on how we can improve your data center’s sustainability credentials while reducing costs, get in touch with the Procurri team today!
