Below is an excerpt from a recent interaction between Rajesh Dangi, Chief Digital Officer, NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Technologies, and team IT-Voice.
Prateek: What are the common sources of power generation in India?
Rajesh Dangi: India’s power sector is one of the most diversified in the entire world. According to a Statistical Review, India is the third-largest energy consumer in the world after China and the United States, and its need for energy supply continues to climb as a result of the country’s dynamic economic growth, population growth, and modernization over the past several years.
Sources of power generation range from conventional sources such as coal, lignite, natural gas, oil, hydro and nuclear power to viable non-conventional sources such as wind, solar, and agricultural and domestic waste. Although, the energy that is produced by nuclear power plants is renewable, but the fuel that is required is not renewable, hence we need to focus on the renewable sources of power generation to reduce carbon footprint.
Prateek: What is a Green Datacenter, how a Datacenter can become a Green Datacenter?
Rajesh Dangi: A Green Datacenter is a facility which minimises its impact on our environment due to the key elements within its design, including power and water utilisation, carbon dioxide creation and the materials required to produce the equipment within it. They are designed for maximum energy efficiency with minimum environmental impact.
Buildings have to be efficient in how they use electricity and water. The cooling of the IT equipment within the infrastructure must be carefully considered, and likewise the power utilisation within each server and every rack. Many of the key factors that define a green datacenter are invisible. These include external factors such as improving heat dissipation, or internal considerations such as airflow design. The construction and operation of a green datacenter includes advanced technologies and strategies.
Here are some ways-
- Minimizing the footprints of the buildings
- The use of low-emission building materials, carpets and paints
- Sustainable landscaping
- Waste recycling
- Installation of catalytic converters on backup generators
- The use of alternative energy technologies such as photovoltaics, heat pumps, and evaporative cooling
- The use of hybrid or electric company vehicles
Prateek: What are your growth/future plans for 2022-23?
Rajesh Dangi: NxtGen Infinite Datacenter, which is primarily into the cloud storage and computing segment, is eyeing investments to the tune of ₹400 crore across 10 data centres in India. The new units, which will be owned, operated and managed by the company, are likely to be operational by December next year.
Data centres are expected to come up in places such as Chennai, Hyderabad, Vizag, and Jaipur.
NxtGen currently has four large operating data centres – one each in Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Delhi.
Prateek: How NxtGen plans to be Carbon negative by 2025?
Rajesh Dangi: NxtGen has always been environmentally conscious since its inception. Since 2014, NxtGen undertook a pledge of transitioning to create foundational elements that will be integral to achieving our long-term goal of 100% clean and renewable energy usage across all facilities by 2025.
Efficiency and green energy are key components of our approach to designing, building, and operating sustainable data centers. This was made possible by procuring the following renewable energies and driving power-saving initiatives to achieve our goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2025.
Solar Energy for In-house Power Generation:
The solar energy installation on the NxtGen Bidadi data center’s wide rooftop consists of 1044 solar panels across an area of approximately 35,000 square feet. The panels will help to reduce carbon levels by 575447 Kg per year over 25 years.
Solar campus lighting
NxtGen relies on a vast amount of solar energy for its datacenter electricity requirements and thus installed solar-powered lights across the campus. A major advantage of Solar-powered lights is that they provide high-quality light for more than five days without a single ray of light due to advancements in battery technology. Sourcing Green Power from Wind NxtGen’s Bangalore datacenter runs its operations on a significant amount of wind power and other Green Power Sources. The contribution of these renewable energy sources to the company’s electricity generation was 6500 Units in May, 2,00,000 Units in June, and 1,60,000 units in July 2021. The low energy requirements coupled with the low-cost electricity produced by the wind turbine itself can pass on substantial cost savings to our customers. As a result, our services are competitively priced and eco-friendly with a near-zero carbon footprint.
LED Lightings across all NxtGen facilities
NxtGen has installed LED lightings across all its facilities as they are critical to lifetime and quality consistency. The Bidadi datacenter utilizes 431 LED Lighting Fixtures of all types with an average rating of 40W across 33144 Sq ft. LED technology has become extremely efficient and has a long product life compared with traditional lighting types.
Power Saving Initiatives
NxtGen Datacenters are designed to deliver efficiency with variable load & variable ambient temperature. We have migrated 100% of the storage to SSDs which led to 70 times lower power consumption as compared to spinning disks and operate nearly at 40 Petabytes, reducing costs up to ₹13.52 Crores per Annum. NxtGen also leverages low TDP servers with high-efficiency processors, which led our compute power to double with zero increase in power consumption over the past 3 years.
