Supermicro report
highlights environmental
impact of data centres
S
uper Micro Computer, Inc, a global
leader in enterprise computing,
storage, networking solutions and
green computing technology, has released
its first annual Data Centers and The
Environment survey report.
The rapid growth of large-scale data
centres brings both business and
environmental challenges to data centre
managers. The report is targeted to help
data centre managers better understand
the industry norms around environmental
impact, provide quantitative comparisons
of their peer group and ultimately help data
centre managers reduce the environmental
impact of their data centres.
The report highlights the need for IT
managers to quantify the real impact data
centres can have on the environment and
some of the opportunities to significantly
minimise the impact.
The report found that 43% of respondent
companies have no existing environmental
policy and half of those companies have
no plan to develop one in the near future.
The report documents the usage of power
efficiency metrics in the data centre and
peer group comparisons to help data centre
managers benchmark their performance.
A total of 59% of respondents considered
power efficiency as ‘extremely important’
or ‘important’ to their actual data
centre design. However, over half of the
respondents (58%) are still not measuring
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), which
is the ratio of total energy used by a data
centre facility to the energy delivered to
the IT equipment.
For those that did measure PUE, 22%
have an average data centre PUE of 2.0
or higher and only 6% are with the ideal
range between 1.0 and 1.19.
The report also reveals that about one in
10 businesses have not yet implemented
an equipment recycling programme to
help limit E-Waste.
A total of 12% of survey respondents do not
do any type of systems recycling and simply
dispose of decommissioned hardware.
“The findings of this new research report
should help start the conversation in the
IT industry on the impact of data centres
on the environment,” said Charles Liang,
President and CEO of Supermicro.
“As a hardware solution company, we are
investing heavily in our resource-saving
server, accelerator and storage solutions,
including the development of 10-year
life-cycle chassis, power supplies, fans and
other subsystems, to help end-customers
save both energy cost and hardware
acquisition costs while reducing IT waste.
“Resource-saving is measured by TCE
(Total Cost to the Environment), which is
the combination of delivering superior TCO
for data centre investments while at the
same time minimising the environmental
impacts of these data centres.”
Supermicro’s resource-saving architecture
disaggregates the CPU and memory as well
as other subsystems, so each resource can
be refreshed independently allowing data
centres to reduce refresh cycle costs and
their impact to the environment (TCE). ◊
These companies stated they avoid
considering environmental issues because
they consider them too expensive (29%),
they lack resources or understanding
(27%) or environmental issues are simply
not a company priority (14%).
Helping companies to connect
corporate environmental
strategies with their data centre
growth challenges
A total of 58% of businesses already
have an environmental policy in place,
but only 28% of respondents consider
environmental issues in the selection of
data centre technology.
Similarly, only 9% indicated energy
efficiency as the top criterion when
setting data centre design strategy.
50
Issue 01
www.intelligentdatacentres.com