While the hardware used in datacentres is becoming increasingly energy-efficient, and the practices undertaken therein are aimed at energy reduction, the demand for more data on more devices is growing exponentially. So says Glenn Noome, director at Smart Integration, an Ulwembu Business Services company. He adds that we now have IoT devices creating their own data, and AI creating responses to that data, which increases the need for datacentres even further. “To address this, we definitely need to keep the focus on energy-efficient equipment and practices, as well as renewable energy as a substantial part of energy creation.”

This is placing a major emphasis on controlling and decreasing emissions and reducing the carbon footprint, adds Louis van den Berg, consultant at Datacentrix, as most legacy datacentres don’t really have the capability to handle new volumes and complexities. “The emphasis now is on moving to co-located services and harnessing cloud technology, using virtual machines and hyperconvergence to provide processing power.”