As enterprises become more environment-conscious, how will the types of energy that power their DCs affect how those facilities are planned and operated? Senior executives from the supply and use sides of the industry shared their thoughts on this at a roundtable discussion in Perth.

The roundtable started with the moderator Nick Parfitt, Lead Analyst for DatacenterDynamics publication in the Asia Pacific, inviting the four panel members to introduce themselves. Shortly after Gavin Dudley, Head of Portfolio – Data Centres at Fujitsu Australia Ltd., shared how his company, as a big buyer of electricity, puts a lot of thought into how it purchases electricity, including that from green sources. On the operations side, he added, the company is continually seeking ways to improve how it uses electricity and actively engages its corporate DC clients on how such efficiency improvements turn out for them.

Joseph Ozdemir, IT Infrastructure Delivery Manager at Mineral Resources Ltd., spoke about how his company, a vertically integrated mining services and mining business that produces 29% of the world's lithium, is different in that it builds its own DCs and other facilities and generates all its power by itself as it operates in remote areas.

“What's changed in the mining industry is ten to fifteen years ago the IT infrastructure hosted on a mine site wasn't critical for running the mine compared to now. The driverless automated trucks running on a private LTE that we have now is really the biggest uplift that I've seen in better facilities. The criticality of the hosting facilities is driven by such trucks, for which downtime comes at a heavy price.

“There's a shift in the mining industry to reduce emissions and obviously solar, gas, wind, whatever all play a part in that. We're trying to make that step towards reducing emissions and are planning to produce and supply our own gas to our mines. Energy lost in the DC space is a huge focus across the business.”

 Next up was Coulston CEO, Founder and CEO of GreenSquareDC, which will be building a 96MW hyperscale ‘new age’ sustainable DC in Perth that will serve environmentally conscious global and regional customers.

“One of the fundamental reasons why we chose Perth is the availability and the pricing of power, especially green power. In the west coast about 36% of electricity in the grid comes from coal generation, lower than in the east coast. So it's greener and also cheaper. The good thing is in this day and age is there are a few different utilities and suppliers that you can get certified green energy from.”

While there was unanimous agreement among the panel members that green energy will become more prevalent and essential to DCs, what DC operators want most is when it comes to electricity supply is clean and stable power, said Sanjay Motwani, Vice-President – APAC, Raritan.

“When I speak to customers the feedback I get is they want clean and stable power. Stable means you have primary and secondary sources of power. The challenge comes when you're talking about clean power. You’re buying power from one or several sources, or even generating your own. However, you have little or no control in terms of the quality of power going into your DC.”

More often than not, he added, people assume that because it is coming through a UPS, everything is fine and taken care of.

 The challenge is it does not so happen. Even if it's coming through the UPS, it does not guarantee clean and stable power. “There is always residual current in the system which nobody is tracking or monitoring. Residual current can trip the entire DC if you're not tracking it.” 

What Raritan has noticed, he said, is that many DC operators do not invest for the 0.01% contingency associated with UPS maintenance downtime. There is clearly a need to invest in real-time metrics to understand the quality and the kind of power coming into the DC on a continuous basis. 

Roundtable moderator Parfitt related an interview in 2019 in which he had asked the CEO of a major DC colocation facility in the east coast of Australia about adopting renewable energy. His answer was an emphatic no as clients wouldn't pay the then higher rates for green energy.

The dynamics of the DC and green energy markets have changed significantly since then. Enterprises have become more accepting of non-traditional sources of energy – now cheaper – making it easier for providers of DC solutions and services to make a case for green energy with their clients.

For Fujitsu Australia becoming greener is non-negotiable. “We're not going to charge more for green energy. If a customer were to come to us and say ‘please don't give me a green outcome’, we would not do it,” said Dudley. 

And while DCs are now seen less as huge energy guzzlers and more as highly efficient and space-efficient computing facilities, there is still a need to optimise existing infrastructure as much as possible, said Motwani of Raritan.

“The ability to adapt to business needs is absolutely critical so the DCs centers which will survive will be the ones which will be able to adapt quickly. The rate of adaptation to the environment is increasing faster and faster so such optimization must be on a continual basis.”