Colocation is on the rise and renewable energy investments by data center and cloud providers in combination with modern hybrid cloud frameworks can make enterprise IT sustainability easier.
Going Green
All the major tech companies have loudly proclaimed their commitment to “going green,” and recently the pledges only grew bigger. Microsoft promised earlier this year that it would achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. Amazon made a similar promise last year, although it gave itself until 2040 to make good on it. Netflix and Facebook, like others of their size, maintain sustainability reports that track the environmental impact of their operations and describe their efforts to reduce it.
It’s one thing to make big promises if you’re a huge tech company with pockets deep enough to rent entire wind farms to power your data centers, as Amazon has done, or purchase carbon offsets for all your operations’ energy consumption in pursuit of carbon neutrality. But what about smaller enterprises that want to take a sustainable approach to energy consumption for their IT operations but don’t have anywhere near the kind of resources the giants do? For them, it’s hard to do, especially when relying on on-premises data centers and have little control over where their energy comes from.
Colocation as Secured Storage
Colocation, in simple terms, is like secured storage for data servers. Providers offer companies the physical space to store, manage, and run their data servers. Warehouse-like facilities are filled with towers of racks, rented out to any company dealing with large volumes of data.
Colocation facilities are helping businesses sustain their operations amid the pandemic. This is made possible by hybrid cloud frameworks that provide modernized solutions for companies to take advantage of. Container-based hybrid cloud platforms help companies move existing servers to colocation facilities and allow companies to manage their data servers from the public cloud without the need for bespoke management tools.
Kubernetes allows applications to decouple from the specific infrastructure and help to segregate workloads to the public cloud and colocation infrastructure while managing in a unified way.
Choice in Vendors
But one of the major achievements of the hybrid cloud framework is giving companies the ability to choose vendors driven by green-energy initiatives. As data center providers are driven to adopt renewable energy practices, enterprises can continuously update their cloud architecture. Enterprises with on-premise data centers can now shut down their on-prem hardware and move to servers hosted in colocation facilities.
Selecting colocation providers that operate on renewable energy will help businesses in lowering their carbon footprint. According to a white paper from Digital Realty, “it’s more critical than ever for enterprises to seek alternative energy solutions for their data center infrastructure,” particularly as increasing use of technology like IoT and artificial intelligence is amassing greater volumes of data than ever before.
Sustainability-focused data centers now offer advanced cooling systems which optimize air flow with smart sensors, while many in the colocation industry are switching to clean energy to power their facilities in efforts to offset the environmental impact of their sites.
Original article can be found at T_HQ
