Role of environmental certifications in making Indian industry more competitive: a perspective on green data centres

Abstract

IT companies need to keep energy costs under control to sustain growth. Green data centres help organizations achieve energy efficiency through greater energy efficiency. While green data centres cost higher on capital expenditure, they are expected to provide considerable savings in operational expenditures. The objective of this CCS is to gain an understanding of the state of affairs when it comes to adoption of green data centers by Indian IT companies, and more importantly, what are the challenges that they face in doing so. Since data for the same by Indian companies is not very forthcoming, we started with looking at companies in the US, what efforts have they put in, and what results have been achieved. We have documented some of the efforts by the bigger IT companies in US. It must also be noted here that most of these energy efficiency efforts are unique to each company in course of time as the industry matures and the practices percolate, some of these can be expected to be the industry standards. We also interviewed many professionals from the IT industry, as well as some others from non-IT industry but have done important work towards green data centers (most notably ICICI and M and M). The idea of these interviews was to find out what efforts has the company taken towards data center greening, and what has stopped them from full-fledged greening of data centers. Apart from internalissues, a lot of companies also referred to external problems causing hindrance (lack of standards, government not being very proactive etc)Many of the challenges that face green data centres today come from the scope in underlying technologies to mature. With IT companies, technology vendors and client working together towards greater energy efficient data centres; the industry will see even more vigorous action in setting up and running green data centres. All our findings, based on both primary and secondary research, are consolidated to provide a perspective on green data centers.