Time for action

Sustainability is on the agenda everywhere and energy-saving measures are becoming increasingly important. During the second breakout session at ICE Growing Green, Marjolein Bot and Robbert Hoeffnagel of Amsterdam Economic Board discuss the effects of data traffic growth.

Growth in data

Data traffic has doubled every year for the past 30 years, fortunately this is not the case with the energy required to do so. So energy efficiency has grown well along with it, but exponential growth in data is still expected in the coming years. What can you do to manage this? Fortunately a lot is already happening, data centers themselves are busy working on what they can influence with energy purchased sustainably and the energy efficiency of the infrastructure.

Within the data center, there is still quite a bit of energy saving potential to be achieved, by using certain settings in those servers in a different way. This is currently not happening, power management is basically at the same level 24/7 while data supply and demand is constantly fluctuating. 

LEAP

The Lower Energy Acceleration Program (LEAP) stands for energy savings with ICT within data centers. Here they join forces of different parties to make a difference. A surprising aspect of this coalition is that many companies are participating in this track to contribute to energy savings, among other things, because these are currently very important issues. 

Robbert and Marjolein provided a lot of information on current topics during the session. Afterwards, attendees shared their views on data management and what innovations are already being applied in the company where these individuals work.

AMECBoard

What can we do about the limited energy still available to allow the enormous growth in data and thus data centers to grow in a controlled manner. Is growth desirable or are we forced to work smarter in order to limit the growth in data on the one hand and otherwise deal smarter with energy consumption in the data center on the other. That is what we started working on during this break-out session. After an introduction about the (energy) ambition of AMECBoard and Amsterdam Green IT, represented by Marjolein Bot and Robbert Hoeffnagel, the group was split into two and actively worked on the questions related to power management, why IT administrators do not or not enough apply this and how we can adjust our behavior for data management. Great feedback from both working groups, which were mainly about awareness, training employees differently, small steps also contribute, such things. AMECBoard will also conduct this research on a larger scale and then publish the results through the IT Circle. Amsterdam is clearly going for a more sustainable environment, private and public!