Kevin Kent, Founder & CEO of Critical Facility Efficiency Solutions returns to CDC Sydney where he will revisit his keynote of 2018 with new thoughts, experiences and learnings: “Energy Crisis in the Data Centre: Are we still waiting on the world to change?”
Since delivering the talk in 2018 much has changed for Kevin. He is now resident in South Africa where he moved to be closer to the boom in data centers across the continent. This provides interesting comparisons to his previous role as Data Center Operations Manager at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Kent described a number of the key challenges he sees in the RSA as “grid instability, the country uses 20% more power than can be generated, it is heavily coal reliant and exports high quality coal which is a huge source of income. Landfills will be totally full in 4 years’ time so it all gets shipped off and eWaste a very big, very real problem”. In this context, he sees the influence of the global and publicly traded hyperscalers and the regulations they bring with them from Europe and North America as positive.
There is more in common with practices at the other side of the Indian Ocean than might be expected of two data center markets at different levels of maturity. He considers eWaste in Australia to be an issue as is the continuing dependence on fossil fuels.
So what in Kevin’s opinion has changed since 2018? He nominates the volume of data and the unravelling of Moore’s Law and the increasing focus on IT-side efficiency: “I can walk into any data centre anywhere and see that for the majority of servers, the amount of idle time is very, very high, there’s very low CPU utilisation”.
Kevin will bring in examples of change from other countries including the re-use of heat waste (now a requirement in Germany) and an underground data center in a cave in the Ozarks which feeds heat into greenhouse where they grow vegetables which are then given to local open shelters.
He describes how conferences he has attended have shaped his thinking on ESG:
“I started off about 25 years ago and I used to go along to conferences in the States to listen to presentations on efficiency. They were delivered by older gentlemen and they were speaking in a language that was unfamiliar to me and it was incredibly overwhelming and it felt like it was so much above my skill set. But as the years progressed, I started realizing it’s actually very easy to self educate. There are so many industry guidelines and principles and ISOs. So what I always try to do is help people understand not only is it relatively easy, it can need no money or very, very little money and the returns will be high financially, operationally and socially”.
But he warns that the industry must act while it still has the choice:
“We’re really at this tipping point now where maybe we have a few years where we can decide it’s a nice thing to do but we don’t necessarily want to spend any money on it. It might make us look good. But we’re just a few years away from where we’re not really going to have a choice. And we can start understanding and start with the very, very small things and work our way up as we go through the journey of sustainability. It’s incredibly doable. It’s very rewarding. And it’s better to be ahead of the game than having regulations chasing behind us, telling us what we have to do as that’s when it gets expensive, when time is no longer on our side”.
Share in Kevin’s insights on ESG practices based on his own experiences of running data centers and of consulting globally. He will be speaking at the International Convention Centre, Sydney on Thursday March 14th September.
For further information and to register, please visit: https://w.media/events/sydney-cloud-datacenter-convention-2023/
