Presented by Kevin Kent, Data Center Operations Manager, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center

Continuous rapid growth and adoption of data hungry IT equipment is escalating the need for greater amounts of energy to keep data centers running and highly available. Researchers estimate 50 billion new devices will be connected to the internet by 2020 and will surpass 100 billion devices by 2025. The data center industry will be one of the top five energy consumers in the world, with 65% of power generation supplied by burning fossil fuels, producing 14% of global carbon emissions. As data centers are becoming a corner stone in the global economy with the expectation of 4,000 new mega data centers in the US by 2020, the ominous challenge must be a paradigm shift from rapid explosive data center growth to effectively and responsibly reducing data center energy consumption.