Pawan Kumar
Sustainable Data Center
We’ve found another reason why CIOs hate technical debt, especially in a time when businesses are under more pressure to improve their energy efficiency: technical debt wastes energy and hurts ESG initiatives. Here’s why that’s a problem and how to make reducing technical debt part of your plan for a sustainable data centre.
What technical debt means for energy
Technical debt, which refers to inefficient IT processes or resources that a business could fix but chooses not to, hurts sustainability for a simple reason: Technical debt leads to inefficiency, and inefficiency means that workloads use more resources. Since workloads use more resources, the infrastructure that hosts them needs more energy to run (not to mention more power to cool).
To see what this means in the real world, think about the technical debt example of an application with bad code that uses 20% more CPU than it would if its algorithms were optimised. The application will use the same amount more energy if it uses 20% more CPU than it did before.
Besides technical debt, there are other ways to waste energy
How getting rid of technical debt helps the environment
Not only cases of technical debt that are narrowly defined waste energy. If you use a resource in your data centre without a reason to, it will use more energy and cost you more money.
For example, Kelly Fleming, CIO of Cirrus Nexus, said that storing data that doesn’t need to be stored was a waste of energy. “If a company doesn’t control and limit data hoarding, it can hurt not only its bottom line but also its goals for being environmentally friendly,” he told Sustainable Data Center Knowledge.
The same thing happens with servers or programmes that aren’t needed. For example, developers who start up an application instance to test it but forget to shut it down waste energy for no good reason.
Steps toward a more Sustainable Data Center
To avoid the types of energy waste listed above, you must first be able to see which resources you are using and what their purpose is.
“Understanding and managing the software and IT landscape of your business is the key to long-term operations,” Steffen Wittmann, CTO of LeanIX, told Data Center Knowledge. This helps make sure that “unused applications will be removed and idle processes will be stopped.”
He then suggested that businesses make an inventory of their IT assets so they can see what is running and figure out what each workload is for. “As soon as a basic inventory is made, applications will be mapped to business capabilities and then tied to concrete business values and outcomes,” he said. “This is the basis for making apps more useful and for managing risk.”
In a similar way, Fleming mentioned data tagging as a way to keep track of what data is in a Sustainable Data Center and figure out when data should be taken out to save energy. “Data in the cloud often ends up on orphaned, unused resources of different kinds, like discs, databases, storage blobs, and data lakes,” he said. “Without the right tagging tools in place, it can be hard to keep track of the service owners of data resources.”
Also Read: Intel Scraps Plans for a “Mega Lab” to Study Cooling in Intel Data Centers
Fleming also stressed that businesses can and should use other ways to improve the sustainability of their data centres, such as getting power from cleaner sources, but that turning off unnecessary data resources is one of the easiest and most effective things they can do right away to cut their energy use. It doesn’t need a lot of complicated planning or new hardware systems.
At #CriticalInsight, Brian Clavin, Head of Battery Energy Storage and Sustainable Solutions at Total Data Centre Solutions, explored how Battery Energy Storage Systems (#BESS) could help to reduce organisations’ #carbonfootprint: https://t.co/Rjxjo67KM2
— Data Centre Review (@DCRmagazine) January 25, 2023
As for just moving tasks to the cloud, that isn’t always a simple way to use less energy. Wittmann says that cloud-based workloads that aren’t needed or that have technical debt will waste energy just like they do on-premises. “Using the lift-and-shift method to move an existing software landscape to the cloud won’t bring any big benefits in terms of cost savings or sustainability,” he said.
Cutting technical debt is the first step to making something last.
Going forward, businesses that want to use less energy and do better on the sustainability front will have to fight technical debt and wasteful resources as hard as they can. Moving to the cloud might seem like a simple way to become more eco-friendly, but that’s not always the case.
If you don’t take steps to optimise a workload that isn’t working in your private data centre, it won’t work in the public cloud either. You should also figure out if the workload needs to run at all.
