Many countries place high importance on sustainability and data centers. The focus of many green projects is often on large-scale data centers because they have the financial resources and the manpower to design and implement a more sustainable data center infrastructure. This isn't always the case for smaller data centers. Oftentimes, they lack the resources and the knowledge to assess their environmental performance, let alone come up with projects and the financial resources to improve it.

Among the issues here is a lack of ready-to-use tools for analyzing and managing green targets. For instance, how would a small data center facility do a baseline measurement of its CO2 emissions?

Slowly but surely, things are improving. For example, Normative, a provider of a software engine for automatic CO2 emissions calculations, recently launched a tool that allows data centers and other companies to calculate the amount of CO2 they emit. The tool can be used to set and monitor targets to reduce CO2 and other emissions to zero. The tool was developed in collaboration with Google.org. It is available through the UN-backed SME Climate Hub.

Small and medium-sized businesses can use the tool to calculate their sector average emissions. The software indicates where a company can take action to reduce emissions. Also included are estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from comparable companies in the same industry and country.

Kristian Rönn, Normative's co-founder and CEO, said that reducing emissions directly from fossil fuel combustion in the data center, energy, chemical, and heavy industries sectors would lower scope 2 and 3 emissions across the economy. Companies can begin to achieve the ultimate goal of zero-emissions or zero-emission businesses based on these insights.

Photo credit: Markus Spiske