To impress Empress Catherine II(The Great), during her 1787 Crimea tour, Prince Potemkin erected a number of fake villages along the Dnieper river. Overnight, they were dismantled and re-erected further down the river to give an image of prosperity. In time, any such deceptive stratagem came to be called a “Potemkin village”. While there is no intent to deceive, data centres/server rooms may be modern Potemkin villages. They look very impressive with state-of-the art technology, but they have a hidden secret.
A consensus between academic research and industry confirms massive server inefficiencies. In a typical data centre, 30% of servers deliver no useful work for 95% of the time, while consuming 50% of their maximum energy consumption. .
Data centre operational costs would be 30% lower with effective energy management, saving the data centre industry €60 Billion/year, and over 100 million tonnes in CO2e emissions. At a local level, a 1kW idle server in a colocation environment wastes more than £3,500/year, in electricity alone.
Beeyon’s One Million Tonnes Campaign (www.beeyon.com/the-one-million-tonnes-campaign/) aims to eradicate this wastage and save money and the environment.
