Second only to cloud computing, “green data centers” are a hot topic in the tech industry. A data center is a physical location for the storage, management, and dissemination of data. In a green data center, those processes – mechanical, lighting, electrical and computer systems and the cooling equipment used to keep them running, are designed for the greatest possible energy efficiency and minimum environmental impact. It’s certainly a real and not imagined issue – the IT industry is currently responsible for about two percent of the world’s carbon emissions. With the rapid growth of data centers in both developed and developing countries and the seemingly endless expansion of Internet-based services, this means that IT is one of the fastest growing culprits for global carbon emissions. Alongside it, green IT is booming.

According to a new report from “clean tech” research organization Pike Research, investment in green data centers will see astronomical growth in the next five years, increasing from today’s $7.5 billion in global revenue to $41.4 billion by 2015. Green data centers will represent 28 percent of the total data center marketplace. Pike has projected that power and cooling solutions will take up the bulk of the growth and account for 46 percent of revenue over the next five years. Energy-efficient IT equipment is the second largest category with 41 percent of the market, with monitoring and management coming in third at 14 percent of total revenue.

Pike’s report, “Green Data Centers,”  takes an in-depth look at green data center trends, and forecasts the size and growth of the market opportunity, broken out by region and technology, through 2015. The study looks at new developments in power and cooling infrastructure, server, storage and network technology, and the software management systems that support green data centers. The study also outlines the strategies of key “green data center” industry players by their market approaches, technical innovations and internal efforts to build more energy-efficient data centers.

So what’s responsible for all the growth? Well, as much as we’d like to think it’s the case, an attack of environmental conscience is probably NOT the primary reason. Nor is the fact that being able to tell customers your data center is green is great for public relations and makes you feel virtuous. In a nutshell, data centers need to grow if they are supporting a growing organization, and many data centers today have reached the limits of possible growth: they simply don’t have enough physical space or power to expand, and they are at the limits of their cooling capabilities (and paying monstrous energy bills, to boot).

It also may soon be a matter of government mandate. In the United States, the EPA is still officially studying the matter of energy use by data centers and has issued no rules, but this is fairly certain to change. In Europe, the EU has actually established a directive to attain a 20 percent reduction in energy usage by data centers by 2020, and countries that have signed onto the Kyoto treaty, such as our great neighbor to the north, will find that it addresses – and makes mandates for – the IT industry.

A green data center, over the course of its lifetime, can save an organization a great deal of money. Building and certifying a green data center or other facility can be expensive up front (a fact that is still keeping some cash-poor companies away, particularly in the current stringent climate for lending), but very attractive long-term cost savings can be realized on operations and maintenance. Many companies seem to be embracing the inevitable. An IBM study found that today, at least 53 percent of U.S. companies have someone at the board level whose primary job function it is to address corporate environmental issues, including those of the IT variety.

But as with most projects that sound great, it’s easier said than done. Social networking giant Facebook generated a lot of press this year when it announced the building of a green data center back in January. Press releases touted the planned use of evaporative cooling systems, airside economizing (bringing cooler outside air into server rooms to cool equipment naturally), the capture and reuse of server heat to warm work spaces in colder weather and strategic use of continuous uninterruptible power supply (UPS) technology.

Underneath the mountains of publicity, however, someone did the math and determined that the planned 147,000 square foot Facebook facility, when completed in the spring of 2011, will yield a PUE (power usage effectiveness rating) of only 1.5, a figure that environmental group Greenpeace basically called laughable (though not in so many words). The problem, it appears, is that no matter how efficient the Facebook data center becomes, it is located in Prineville, Oregon, which gets its energy from PacificCorp, a regional power company that generates a lot of its electricity from the burning of coal.

A data center’s efficiency is measured by PUE, which is determined by figuring out the total amount of power coming into a data center and dividing that figure by the total IT equipment power in the data center. Lower numbers are more desirable, because this means that most of the electricity in the data center is actually being used by the servers and other equipment rather than wasted. A perfect PUE would be 1 (though no one has ever actually attained it). Most data centers don’t know what their PUE is, largely because they have no accurate way to measure both the incoming power and their power use. (A critical component of a green data center is the ability to accurately measure both figures.)

The irony to this tiff? Newspaper reporters in Oregon unearthed evidence that Greenpeace’s data centers aren’t exactly up to throwing stones: the group’s offices in New York and San Francisco draw significant power from non-renewable energy sources, and its primary data center is served by a Dutch power company that is low-carbon on paper not because of the marvelous efficiency of its operations, but because it uses carbon credits to offset its emissions.

Games one and two go to Facebook in this match, I think.

– Tracey E. Schelmetic

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