INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Green Technology
Supermicro report
highlights environmental
impact of datacentres
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Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), which
is the ratio of total energy used by a
datacentre facility to the energy delivered
to the IT equipment. For those that did
measure PUE, 22% have an average
datacentre 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.
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 datacentres
brings both business and environmental
challenges to datacentre managers. The
report is targeted to help datacentre
managers better understand the industry
norms around environmental impact,
provide quantitative comparisons of their
peer group and ultimately help datacentre
managers reduce the environmental impact
of their data centres.
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 datacentre
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 datacentre
technology. Similarly, only 9% indicated
energy efficiency as the top criterion when
setting datacentre design strategy.
The report highlights the need for IT
managers to quantify the real impact
datacentres can have on the environment
and some of the opportunities to
significantly minimise the impact. The report documents the usage of power
efficiency metrics in the datacentre and
peer group comparisons to help datacentre
managers benchmark their performance.
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 A total of 59% of respondents considered
power efficiency as ‘extremely important’
or ‘important’ to their actual datacentre
design. However, over half of the
respondents (58%) are still not measuring
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INTELLIGENTCIO
“The findings of this new research report
should help start the conversation in the
IT industry on the impact of datacentres
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
datacentre investments while at the same
time minimising the environmental impacts
of these datacentres.”
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
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