Data Centres Under Scrutiny at Sustainability LIVE
The world's growing reliance on digital technology has led to rapid expansion for the data centre sector. These facilities are vital for powering the digital economy, but their energy-intensive operations have raised concerns about their environmental impact.
From renewable energy integration to water conservation and waste reduction, data centres across the world are setting new standards for environmental responsibility in the data centre sector.
Our sister title Sustainability LIVE continues to expand its events, with more to come in 2024 and 2025. NetApp, an American data infrastructure company that provides cloud operations solutions, unified data storage and integrated data services, spoke at Sustainability LIVE: Net Zero, in March this year.
Paul van der Lingen, Solutions Architects Director at NetApp, discussed how most people weren’t aware of the environmental impact of data waste, yet data centres create more pollution than the entire aviation industry.
“In 2020 ICT was using 2% of the world’s electricity. By 2030 it’s going to be closer to 13% and data storage is going to be 40% of that,” he said. “Here’s the tragedy: 68% of corporate data created is never looked at, never used, never referenced, never searched or indexed. Because people worry it might have value, it needs to be cooled, managed, secured and protected.”
Watch his full interview here:
Improving data centre management with AI and sustainability-minded leadership
Paul gave examples to explain how so much data waste is accumulated and what to avoid to prevent further energy use.
“If you have a data scientist who has a unit of data and you’re using this for AI training. Now imagine you have 250 data scientists and each of them wants a copy of the data. In the ‘old world’ you would take that unit and replicate it 250 times so they could each have access to it.
“Then, because you never know whether or not you’ll need it, you would just keep it because it was consequence-free. I believe this is where we are seeing the huge explosion of data coming from. There are better ways of doing that.”
NetApp’s 2023 Data Complexity Report, a worldwide report exploring companies’ growing needs for unified data storage released in October, determined that AI is driving further need for cloud adoption, with the vast majority of organisations still mid-journey. Read more here and don’t forget to read our Top 10 Sustainability Leaders.
Essential diary dates for 2024 and 2025…
Sustainability LIVE continues to expand its events with more to come in 2024 and 2025, discover our essential diary dates below.
2024 diary dates:
- Sustainability LIVE London | 10-11 September 2024
- Sustainability & ESG Awards | 10 September 2024
- Sustainability LIVE: Climate Week NYC | 24 September 2024
- Sustainability LIVE Malta | 17 October 2024
- Sustainability LIVE: Diversity & Inclusion | 12 November 2024
- NEW | The CSO Network
- NEW | ClimateTech Magazine
- NEW | Scope3 Magazine
- NEW | Diversity Magazine
2025 diary dates:
- Sustainability LIVE: Net Zero | 5-6 March 2025
- Sustainability LIVE Singapore | 18 March 2025
- Sustainability LIVE Dubai | 22 April 2025
- Sustainability LIVE Chicago | 4-5 June 2025
- Sustainability LIVE London | 9-10 September 2025
- Sustainability & ESG Awards | 10 September 2025
- Sustainability LIVE: DE&I | 11 November 2025
******
Make sure you check out the latest edition of Data Centre Magazine and also sign up to our global conference series - Tech & AI LIVE 2024
******
Data Centre Magazine is a BizClik brand
