Big Data, Data Centers, and their Environmental Impacts

Big Data, Data Centers, and their Environmental Impacts

By: Jim Bowyer, Ph.D, Kathryn Fernholz, Ed Pepke, Ph.D., Harry Groot, and Sarah Harris

Introduction

Large data centers are a 21st century development. The first data storage center (or mainframe computer) is reported to have been designed by the U.S. military and built at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945. Assembled using thousands of resistors, capacitors, vacuum tubes, relays, and diodes, the facility occupied 300 square feet and weighed 37 tons. Airflow and cooling were critical design considerations.

The emergence of transistors in the 1960s allowed substantial reduction of the space requirements for data centers, allowing placement within office buildings and manufacturing facilities. Memory and storage capacity grew as technology improved. Over the span of less than two decades mainframes largely disappeared, being replaced by ever smaller computers, followed by the introduction of personal computers in 1981. It wasn’t long before millions of these devices began interacting with one another through remote servers numbering in the hundreds or thousands residing in what came to be known as data centers.

Rapid development occurred in the early 2000s with the emergence of Facebook, Amazon on-line shopping, high quality streaming of music and video and more. At about the same time propagation of high-speed wireless broadband served to decouple data from individual devices, creating the ability to access data from any device. This created a market for mobile electronics that led to a rise in the number of endpoint devices. In the span of 5 years – 2018 to 2023 – the number of devices globally rose 50%, from 2.4 to 3.6 per capita. On the business front, several companies began offering IT infrastructure, including computing and cloud storage functions. The entry of Amazon into this market in 2006 brought about rapid growth, with a reported 38 percent of organizations utilizing cloud services just six years later. All of this translated to demand for data storage services on an almost unimaginable scale.

Exchanging email messages, streaming a favorite movie, engaging in multi-player online computer games, sharing photos on Facebook, shopping with the touch of a button, communicating via social media, searching for information on the web, seamlessly backing up computer files to the cloud – all utterly transformative to the economy and society at large. And most recently the advent of AI which promises to further revolutionize daily life. But all of this has come at a cost, a cost that has only recently gained the attention of the public: very substantial and rising environmental impacts linked to data centers.

This report examines current and projected environmental impacts of cloud computing and large data centers, highlights technologies for mitigating impacts, and identifies management strategies that businesses and individuals can utilize to reduce their electronic footprints.

Read the Full Report Here!