Even without revealing details, Microsoft is making its activities quite clear. The equipment itself is not secret, and only the composition is not disclosed. And this itself serves as an excellent example for other data center designers.
“It’s a great sustainability example,” Howard said. Large cloud service providers have impressive sustainability initiatives. “If leaders are moving toward becoming good stewards of their communities and natural resources, these efforts will eventually become trends.”
Microsoft’s Community Commitment
The most economical way to cool a facility is evaporative cooling, but it is also the most water consuming. This is why Microsoft consumes hundreds of millions of liters of water annually to cool its data centers.
Microsoft measures water usage through an indicator called Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE). WUE is the annual water consumption for humidification and cooling divided by the total energy consumption of IT equipment. Microsoft operated its data center with an average WUE of 0.30 L/kWh in the last fiscal year. This is a 39% improvement over the global average of 0.49 L/kWh reported in 2021.
But there are some trade-offs as well. Traditional data center cooling systems evaporate water to reduce power demand. Microsoft is converting its evaporative system to mechanical cooling, which will slightly increase power consumption and increase Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), a measure of a data center’s energy efficiency.
The new data center design was announced by Microsoft in June 2024. Datacenter Community PledgeIt is part of In this pledge, Microsoft pledged to build and operate digital infrastructure that addresses social issues such as climate change and benefits local communities. Microsoft also said it plans to eventually transition its global operations to 100% renewable energy.
dl-itworldkorea@foundryco.com
Source: www.itworld.co.kr
