Super 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.
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.
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).
