The environmental footprint of your Cloud

Interview with our partner CIV, a pioneer in GreenIT and environmental footprint reduction.

On the road to digital sobriety: how to reduce the cloud's environmental footprint?

In the enthusiasm that accompanied the digital revolution, we were a little quick to forget the cost of the environmental footprint of the technologies we use every day. The digitization of work tools promised gains in efficiency and resources. (Less paper printing, less travel thanks to the ability to collaborate and communicate online...). The reality is more nuanced, between rebound effects and innovations genuinely beneficial to the necessary ecological transition.

Digital technology, which currently emits 4% of greenhouse gases, is both part of the problem and part of the solution in the fight against global warming. At a time when "digital sobriety" is emerging - as it is in other sectors, such as transport and food - we'd like to contribute, on our own scale, some ideas for building greener, more reasoned, more sober IT infrastructures and cloud services. It's a complex subject, involving every link in the chain, from the (eco)design of services to their use, including hosting and the solutions deployed to ensure their availability at all hours of the day and night.

Hosting digital services is exactly what we're going to start this series of articles with. While the concept of "cloud computing" conjures up an abstract universe of innocuous clouds and resources available in a few clicks, billed on demand, the proliferation of datacenters across the country brings us back down to earth, facing veritable factories, whose cooling systems and servers operating to provide digital services would consume between 7 and 10% of the country's electricity production in France.

Scalair, to deploy its own Cloud infrastructure, relies on a regional player: CIV.

A player often cited as a benchmark in the industry when it comes to "green" hosting. And with good reason: ever since it was founded, CIV has been constantly improving the energy efficiency of the server rooms it provides for its customers, experimenting in every possible way. This determination to control and reduce the environmental footprint of its activity is first and foremost the result of a personal conviction on the part of the company's founders. It is now a competitive advantage, and a criterion of choice for committed companies. Interview with Sébastien Cousin, CIV General Manager & Innovation.

France has between 200 and 250 datacenters, ranking 8th in the world for this type of infrastructure. The explosion in the number of these "digital factories" is beginning to cause concern. With good reason?

Fingers are pointed at these energy-guzzling monsters on the outskirts of cities, but let's clear up a misunderstanding: cloud computing, i.e. the outsourcing and pooling of servers through virtualization rather than having one's own rooms, has not in itself aggravated the problem. By concentrating machines previously scattered across companies in a single location, it has certainly made the phenomenon more visible, but it has also enabled considerable energy economies of scale. Conventional on-premise hosting multiplies a server's basic electricity consumption by a factor of 3 on average. A datacenter reduces this ratio to 1.6, or even much less for the most efficient: 1.3 in the case of CIV! Not to mention the gains in terms of security and machine availability, since pooling means that human and technical resources can be deployed to guarantee business continuity.

And let's be honest: every time costs come down - hosting costs, but also the cost of computing power and storage, by virtue of Moore's Law - usage increases... which tends to erase, from an environmental point of view, the benefits of the economies of scale mentioned above.

Cloud computing makes it possible to forget about hardware. It also makes it possible to ignore its environmental cost, since it is hidden. How can we improve under these conditions?

Until now, the main expectations of a datacenter manager/operator have been to guarantee the physical security of the facilities, both against the risk of fire and intrusion into the buildings, and to ensure the availability of the servers, of course, which implies guaranteeing the power supply and network connection of the equipment at all times, as well as its cooling, necessary for proper operation.

Today, security and availability are no longer criteria of choice, but prerequisites in our business. Digital tools have become so business-critical that it's unthinkable to lose data or put your teams out of work due to the unavailability of an application. This explains the emergence of standards, labels and certifications, which validate the know-how of operators and reassure customers as to the resources deployed by their hosting provider. Customers are now beginning to take an interest in the efforts made by a hosting provider to reduce its environmental impact. Since it is, indirectly, the footprint of their own business.

Environmental footprint: CIV has been a pioneer in this field. How do you explain this?

CIV was founded in 1974. Very early on, we were convinced that we were taking part in a 3rd industrial revolution. While the two previous industrial revolutions undeniably brought progress, they also plundered natural resources and degraded the state of the planet. Today, we know more about the causes of climate change than we did then, and we are convinced that it would be irresponsible not to consider the environmental impact of digital technology. This is what led us to experiment with and upgrade our datacenters for greater energy efficiency, to offer an eco-responsible alternative... even before companies were really interested.

Alongside ecology, a second criterion of choice is slowly but surely reshuffling the cards in the hosting market: digital sovereignty, which means taking an interest in where the data is physically stored, and the legislation governing it. If the data center is located on French soil, it comes under French law.

What levers can data center operators use to reduce their energy footprint?

Machine cooling accounts for 30 to 40% of a datacenter's electricity consumption. It's here that we can innovate, to save money and limit the environmental footprint of our business, and by extension that of our customers. The challenge is therefore to cool servers using as little energy as possible, but also to try to make use of residual heat (energy fatality). Let's not forget that the ISS/ESN also plays its part, since the remaining 60 to 70% of consumption is directly linked to the IT systems hosted. The leverage is also on the side of the operator of the hosted IT systems.

Part 1: What do you do in practical terms? How does your intermediate size, compared with the sector's behemoths, help you in this battle?

Let's be honest: all hosting players have made progress in recent years, including the GAFAMs operating their own data centers. Many have improved energy efficiency in a bid to optimize costs, explaining after the fact that this was also about reducing their environmental footprint. No matter how sincere the rhetoric, on the whole, data centers are becoming increasingly efficient, and that's a good thing.

Each has taken a different path. Many avenues were explored to air-condition data centers using as little energy as possible. For our part, our non-negotiable objective was to make progress without compromising on safety, particularly in terms of fire protection, or performance.

Our size gives us an advantage over other players: agility. In the course of our experiments, we have adopted a number of cooling strategies, including the use of energy recovery units, supplemented by freecooling and high-performance compressors (Turbocor), all of which are used according to seasonality. The installation of aisle confinement to separate cold and hot air flows has also been a major step forward, and is now also recognized by ADEME (the French Environment and Energy Management Agency) as eligible for CEE (Certificat Économie Énergie). The system features an inertial reserve based on the principle of a 50-ton ice cube, which has enabled the water loop's starting temperature to be significantly increased (18°C instead of 09°C), with an unrivalled impact in terms of energy performance.

Part 1: In concrete terms, what do you do?

What's more, we take care to reuse the waste heat generated by servers, which traditionally dissipates into the atmosphere. This energy is lost if we don't use it when it's available. It's heresy not to try and use this heat, but it's not easy to do.

In Valenciennes, our datacenter heats the Serre Numérique (startup incubator and Rubika school premises) and Grand Palais sites in winter, as well as the CIV premises. Thanks to this heating principle (the energy is supplied free of charge, but the beneficiary contributes to the initial investment and operating costs of the thermodynamic systems), buildings connected as such can reduce their carbon footprint by 85%, making it even easier to achieve the most ambitious targets of the tertiary sector decree (Decree no. 2019-771 of July 23, 2019 on obligations for actions to reduce end-use energy consumption in tertiary buildings. The most ambitious target is a 60% reduction in energy consumption by 2050 compared with a reference situation).

These projects remain exceptional, requiring costly studies and agreements... but there are other ways to make the most of waste energy. Heating a municipal swimming pool (ideal, as the water needs to be heated all year round), cultivating plants that require heat, raising insects... There are many possibilities, and we are passionate about trying to implement them, even if there are also many obstacles, as habits and behaviours need to change.

CIV doesn't just improve the energy performance of its data centers and harness waste energy. You go even further. Tell us more.

We worked on two complementary aspects, to offer our customers the best deal in terms of eco-responsible accommodation.

First of all, the energy production aspect: by sourcing renewable energy produced locally (on site) - a more demanding and costly approach than "green energy" contracts, which require CIV to invest a great deal of time and money on the sites concerned. The photovoltaic energy produced in this way enables consumption to be cut back at times when the public energy distribution network is most in demand nationwide.

Secondly, carbon offsetting: for the past 6 years, we have been working to offset carbon emissions. After opting for association-type solutions that promote reforestation on the other side of the world and offer tax credits in return, we have reoriented our choices towards non-association organizations (which are more costly for the company) that operate locally, and are in line with the French Ministry of the Environment's "Label Bas Carbone" objective. Our customers can see for themselves the reforestation taking place less than 100 km from our datacenters.

Today, we are once again looking to experiment with other alternatives, this time to increase the performance of decarbonization actions over time. Where it takes around 20 years to "decarbonize" the carbon emitted in 2019 through reforestation, for example, alternative solutions enable the same action to be taken over a period of 5 years, by working not only on the production of carbonaceous plant matter, but also on reducing the use of high-carbon products such as fertilizers, via the agricultural sector. Less spectacular than a forest, perhaps, but it would enable us to re-encapsulate in 5 years the carbon emitted in 2022 by our activity. This action is currently being studied.

The issue of digital sobriety, eco-responsible digital technology, green IT - whatever you want to call it, as long as it's backed up by action and not greenwashing... - requires action at every link in the chain. What can your customers do to reduce their energy bills?

For my part, as a datacenter operator, I can observe that once a server is switched on, the electrical "overconsumption" generated by server activity is marginal. In other words, when a server is powered up, the most ecological thing to do is to use it to the maximum, to consolidate resources. Non-intrusive software can help monitor server usage. In this way, you can obtain concrete data to identify areas for improvement.

Of course, you can't run servers at 99% of their capacity, if only to absorb potential load peaks. Nor can we dispense with mirror servers in the case of a critical application, to enable immediate failover and continuity of service. Nevertheless, it might be worth asking whether, in many cases, it is really necessary to be able to access everything immediately, despite the energy and environmental cost of this comfort to which we have become accustomed. In the field of digital archiving, we are seeing the emergence of offers where a file can be retrieved within a few hours. And that's just after you've made the request.

We also need to think about the life cycle of our machines, and the rate at which they are renewed. Finally, there's the question of eco-design of applications, and the intelligence that a player like Scalair can bring to the management and pooling of resources. Scalair is experimenting with a mix of uses to make the most of shared server capacities. During the day, these servers are heavily used by corporate tools and applications. But at night, the infrastructure is disproportionate to needs. Why not host online games, which are very popular after dark?

Reducing your environmental footprint? Contact us! https://scalair.fr/contact/