This website and blog are dedicated to driving data center efficiency - without sacrificing reliability, availability, or the environment in the process. This can be a perplexing challenge but technology, innovation, and creativity generally provide a clear path to accomplish these objectives.
However, there have been some discussions of late around building data centers without the protection of a UPS in a quest for increased efficiency. The concept is to build two or more data centers, each without a UPS, and let them fail-over, to the next closest data center. A theory that is challenging and forces us to examine the Efficiency vs. Availability “Environmental Paradox”, when an efficiency decision creates more harm than good for the environment.
A stand-alone, robustly designed data center (with a traditional UPS) has a single landscape/eco-system footprint, a power budget of X, and a corresponding IT requirement. Yes, the X power budget is marginally higher than a data center without a UPS, on the order of 3 to 7% overall, using modern, high-efficiency equipment. It will generally have a high degree of availability while being easy to service, operate, and maintain.
However the redundant data center model requires a footprint over two times the stand-alone. Why? Not only the building and grounds but the access roads, transmission lines, water infrastructure, etc. required all increase the burden placed upon the eco-system. We must include the extra building materials, construction energy, waste, run-off, land-use, destruction of native habitat, etc. Not a pretty picture to run before the likes of the NRDC, Sierra Club, Green Peace, and others.
Energy cost for operations, even without the UPS, must be close to 2X, we’ll call it 1.9X. That is energy only, not manpower which will be 2X. What about software licenses and all those servers, storage devices, routers, etc.? Environmental damages associated with the construction, packaging, delivery of the 2X IT kit? All of which are not exactly inconsequential.
A deeper dive into the “sustainability” aspects of the decision to go UPS-less, by building more, cheaper data centers, will prove this to be an environmental nightmare. Not to mention the associated risks of a system-wide failure due to latency issues, regional catastrophic events (weather is always a good one), network overload, unanticipated application incompatibilities, and the inevitable visit by Murphy.
Make certain you get approval from the CSO on the decision to go UPS-less. It is likely to place you on an environmental poster in a less than kind position.
Have an opinion on the environmental paradox? Send me an email.