Data centers in Singapore are successfully reining in their power consumption, according to the 2014 Data Centre Asia Pacific Census by DatacenterDynamics Intelligence (DCDi).

These findings were presented by Dedric Lam, CEO, Asia Pacific at Datacenter Dynamics during the opening keynote of the inaugural Singapore Data Center Week on October 13. According to Lam, data centers in Singapore are consuming 1.15 million kW in the 2014/2015 period, compared to 1.1 million kW in 2013/2014 and 930,000 kW in 2012/2013.

Sustainable growth
A reduction in the growth of power consumption is notable because while data centers account for just one percent of the total land area in the city-state, they guzzle seven percent of all electricity.

One reason for the slowing growth was identified as the installation of more power-efficient servers in data centers across the country. At the same time, the proportion of respondents from Singapore who cited sustainability as a key investment driver jumped from 22 percent in 2013/2014 to 46 percent in 2014/2015, reflecting a heightened environmental awareness.

There is ample evidence that cloud adoption is growing rapidly in Singapore too, considering that one in five physical racks in its data centers are virtualized or residing in private clouds, on the premises. This figure stands at an average of 16 percent in the Asia Pacific and 15 percent worldwide.

This may explain the reduction in the growth of data center space in Singapore, which will grow by 2.74 percent to 740,000 sq m in 2014/2015, or less than the 6.57 percent increase seen in 2013/2014.

On the cloud front, Lam suggested that the game is changing in Singapore from one of asset growth to “adding value”, as well as the deployment of new technologies and architectures for operators to stay ahead.

“With the cloud, it is possible just to access and pay for what you use on a flexible and scalable basis and to limit your consumption of finite resources by doing that. The cloud is interesting not because of the buzz surrounding it but because it makes economic sense,” said Lam.