Eco-friendly Cloud can reduce energy costs for manufacturers
Rising energy costs are impacting on UK manufacturers’ competitiveness. The government’s recent intervention, funding for high energy usage businesses, is in response to the global shortage of natural gas caused by the war in Ukraine sending prices soaring – but where else can costs be contained to prevent industry-wide shut downs?
If manufacturers are looking to reduce both energy use and costs, there could be a solution in the Cloud, according to technology provider PeaSoup. Data Centre energy and water consumption is under the spotlight and rightly so, given that the typical data centre consumes around 3-5 million gallons of water per day, roughly equivalent to the water consumption of 11,000 people.
Meanwhile, the demand for integration between manufacturing and IT systems has taken off. The Industry 4.0 principle gives customers a valuable snapshot of their factory – the downtime of machines, which of them needs servicing and when, the speed products are going through. Simulation is a key technology for optimising decision making. It can all be done remotely in the cloud.
Cloud and data specialist PeaSoup uses Liquid Immersion Cooling technology. A simple method where servers are submerged in a dielectric liquid within a self-contained unit that cycles the liquid around the energy hungry electronic components, reducing the need for traditional air-cooled systems. As a result, energy consumption is reduced and reliability is improved.
There are also changes that businesses are obliged to make to reduce their effect on the environment, which include reduction of waste, reduction of their carbon footprint, and switching to more sustainable practices.
Data is often a forgotten factor in sustainability but every email sent has a carbon footprint and if you consider the number of emails sent by both individuals and corporations on a daily basis (globally this amounts to around 3.5 million emails per second!) the carbon footprint of that alone is phenomenal!
Another factor that has become more prevalent this year is water security. As more and more data centres are built (the amount of data will always increase), usually in the legacy style of a large warehouse, with atmospheric controls including air conditioning and humidifiers, both with high-level energy consumption, the demand for water also increases.
For example, a 15-megawatt data centre could consume around 1.6 million litres of water per day, roughly that same consumption of around 30,000 people. There are obviously factors influencing the consumption of water by data centres, such as their location and size but the fact remains, they are high consumers of energy and water, but essential to everyday life.
To address this situation, companies can choose to store data in a more sustainable way, with a company that focuses on renewable sources of energy, sustainable practices and technology that has a proven energy consumption of around 40% less than a legacy data centre.
Additionally, the lifespan of servers held within a legacy data centre is short. The heat generated in the constant processing of data burns out the components quickly, meaning more frequent replacement is needed, thus increasing the costs of traditional data storage in comparison to liquid immersion cooling. Technology can more easily withstand the constant and immediately controlled submerged state in the dialectic fluid and lasts longer before a replacement is needed.
The cost of energy has created a great many front pages over the last few months, and still influences headlines. Manufacturers perhaps need to look to reducing consumption rather than the cost which falls outside of their control. PeaSoup has and will always use renewable energy sources to power its data centre storage.
Marketing Manager, Art Malinowski, commented: “We were the first Cloud providers in the UK to use Liquid Immersion Cooling, and this sustainable and energy saving technology is proven to be a more planet friendly way to store data in the cloud. When businesses are looking at solutions for data storage it really should be a consideration to reduce their carbon footprint.”
Put simply, data (and the processing thereof) will continue to grow exponentially. To combat the growing need for both energy and water consumption to process that data, there is a sustainable solution. Cloud based platforms using liquid immersion cooling have an additional benefit: the heat generated from the cooling of the technology can be recycled.
