Energy efficiency of data centers - a system-oriented analysis of current development trends

Abstract

The advancing digitization of all areas of the economy and society is generating significantly increasing demand for processing power. More and more data centers of ever larger size are being built worldwide, and their electricity consumption is constantly on the rise. Forecasts project a significant increase in the global electricity consumption of data centers in the next five years. The presentation discusses the development of data centers' energy consumption and energy efficiency, using the example of Germany. A recent study by Borderstep and Fraunhofer IZM for the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy shows that the electricity consumption of data centers in Germany grew by 15% to 12 billion kilowatt hours from 2010 to 2015. This was the case in spite of considerable efficiency gains in IT hardware and data center infrastructure. If the current trends in IT usage continue, German data centers' energy consumption will increase further and exceed 14 billion kWh in 2020. Reasons for this growth are in particular the increasing number of internet-enabled end-user devices and networked sensors. In addition, more and more processing is being shifted from end-user devices to data centers.