INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Green Technology
Supermicro report
highlights environmental
impact of data centres
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S
uper Micro Computer, 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.
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). n
These companies stated that 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
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