Like most people involved with Data Centers, Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Research at Uptime Institute, didn’t start his career that way; Lawrence’s beginning was IT. As a journalist covering all things IT, Lawrence gravitated to the economic and ecological impacts, which led to his interest in data centers. He joined ‘the Hawk’, Raymond Hawkins, to talk about his career and discuss some of the power challenges faced in the DC industry.

As the head of research at Uptime, Lawrence said there’s a lot of client interest in the efficiency and efficiency of data storage facilities. “There’s obviously a lot of energy being consumed in the IT side, so I feel now there’s starting to be an awareness of how we actually start to tackle that.”

With an awareness that things need to change, executive management in the IT industry is signaling to its investors a move towards carbon-neutral policies. The problem? Saying it ‘net zero’ and getting there are two different things. So, when the decree to go carbon neutral comes down from the top to the data centers, the data centers turn to Lawrence and his team at Uptime for help.

If the goal is to get to carbon neutral without significant reliance on offsets, how should data centers be thought of as stewards of the energy they use? Lawrence felt there was no easy answer, but the data storage industry should work harder to promote its value to the overall IT sector. There is a misconception that data storage centers account for a much more significant percentage of overall global energy usage than they do. But there are various regions and countries where the average is much higher, and there is work to be done to reduce those numbers.