The Water Footprint of Data Centers

The internet and associated Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) are diffusing at an astounding pace. As data centers (DCs) proliferate to accommodate this rising demand, their environmental impacts grow too. While the energy efficiency of DCs has been researched extensively, their water footprint (WF) has so far received little to no attention. This article conducts a preliminary WF accounting for cooling and energy consumption in DCs. The WF of DCs is estimated to be between 1047 and 151,061 m3/TJ. Outbound DC data traffic generates a WF of 1–205 liters per gigabyte (roughly equal to the WF of 1 kg of tomatos at the higher end). It is found that, typically, energy consumption constitues by far the greatest share of DC WF, but the level of uncertainty associated with the WF of different energy sources used by DCs makes a comprehensive assessment of DCs’ water use efficiency very challenging. Much better understanding of DC WF is urgently needed if a meaningful evaluation of this rapidly spreading service technology is to be gleaned and response measures are to be put into effect

Life cycle assessment of videoconferencing with call management servers relying on virtualization

ABSTRACT: Recently, data centres have been called out for their particularly high energy consumption, which already accounts for 1.5% of the total global electricity consumption and is among the world’s fastest growing energy consumptions. To reduce the data centres’ environmental impacts, technologies such as free cooling and sustainable power sources are used. Another newly developed strategy to improve the energy efficiency of data centres is virtualization, which makes it possible to install several operating systems, known as virtual machines (VMs), so that several tasks and users can share a single server. To evaluate the environmental advantages and burdens of this strategy, assessments tools are required. Several studies have already quantified the energetic and environmental benefits of virtualization but often only considered the use phase and CO2 improvement. This study uses life cycle assessment (LCA) to evaluate the environmental impacts of Internet use in videoconferencing (VC). Preliminary results show the advantages of virtualization in the manufacturing, use and endof-life phases. Indeed, when virtualization is implemented, one server can be allocated to several tasks. Therefore, the environmental burden of use and manufacturing will be allocated to the various tasks, decreasing the impact of each one