Scott Tease, Vice President, GM, HPC and AI at Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group, explores the steps needed to build the sustainable data centre of the future.

Contrary to what some people may believe, very little in business happens by luck. Success in anything results from planning, revising those plans based on new conditions, and adjusting resources to accommodate changes. Success in the next era of AI computing will be no different. The adjustment that everybody is making is around the concepts of sustainability and the environmental impact of our IT choices. 

Why the focus on data centre sustainability now? Simply put, data has now become ubiquitous in our lives. Since 2010, the number of people using the internet has more than doubled, according to the World Bank, with internet traffic multiplying more than 20-fold. Add to that, billions of connected devices and sensors coming online every day across the world. 

All that data requires data centres to process our orders, diagnose our cars and ourselves, store the movies we stream, and get us a ride from the airport. All those data centres require electricity to operate. In fact, it is estimated that today, data centres consume 3% of the electrical power generated. With the introduction of AI applications like Chat GPT or Bard, this consumption may double again in far less than a decade. 

Organisations need to establish a sustainability strategy that is clearly guided by policies and practices that consider every stage of the IT lifecycle. They must take sustainability into account across the whole of their value chain, stretching from logistics to services. 

Collaboration and considering vendor practices 

Most IT customers view an asset as ‘theirs’ upon delivery. When building a sustainable IT practice, consideration must be given to the value chain before the truck arrives at the loading dock. This changes the way you interact with your supply chain, making it much more collaborative and can require difficult conversations with suppliers and partners..

From product concept through build, vendors should be evaluated on their commitment to reducing the environmental impact of manufacturing the IT gear you buy. Do they design for sustainability with recyclable materials? Does their factory utilise renewable power? Can they test on-site without shipping to another facility? Do they look for ways to reduce power in the build process?  

Once the product is completed, how is it packaged? Does the vendor have a commitment to reducing ocean bound plastics (OBPs) and other environmentally harmful materials? Is there an option to ‘bulk’ ship to save on both packaging and fuel? 

Changing the biggest impact on IT carbon footprint  

While designing, building and shipping a product has an impact on its carbon footprint, the largest contributor is the actual operation of the system itself. Most enterprise IT systems are in 24/7 operation for four to beyond seven years. Reducing the power an IT asset consumes will have the largest impact on sustainability. Sustainability in the data centre requires planning at every stage of the process, from how the mix of energy is used to how servers are cooled.  

Most power companies use multiple methods of generating electricity. Though burning fossil fuels is still the dominant means, renewables like solar, wind, and hydro are growing.  Customers should see if they can specify renewable sources from their power provider.  

Once powered on, 30-40% of the electricity consumed by the data centre is used for one purpose: cooling. In a traditional air-cooled data centre, cold air is produced from the HVAC system, pushed into the ‘cold aisle’ at the front of a rack, and then the system fans pull the cold air over the system components to remove the heat. The now warm air is expelled to the ‘hot aisle’ and rises back into the air handling units, up to the HVAC system to begin the cycle again. That 30-40% does not process an order or hail an Uber. It just moves cold air from the front of the rack to the rear and turns it into hot air. Clearly, rethinking how cooling in the data centre and inside the servers is one of the first places we should look. 

The demand for data-intensive, power-hungry applications isn’t going to abate in the coming years, with CPUs and GPUs continuing to draw more power. So how do we cool the components of a system without fans and traditional air conditioning? The answer is liquid.  

Liquid cooling is a technique that dates to mainframes starting in the 1960s. Today, liquid cooling technologies are a key factor in sustainable computing and will also enable the next generation of supercomputers built to tackle large challenges such as climate change.  

Even traditional air-cooled systems can become more efficient by implementing energy control software that balances performance and energy usage, and can slow the fans down depending on the workload being run.   

By reducing the power consumed during the life of the asset, we can have the greatest impact on its carbon footprint. So, how can we negate all that power consumed? Certainly, the industry has responded with offerings like carbon offset credits that promise to equalise a system’s total carbon footprint. But wouldn’t it be better to minimise the footprint in the first place?  

End of life

When an IT asset has reached the end of its useful life, how it is disposed can have a tremendous impact on the carbon footprint.  Often the disposal decision is more financial than technical: the equipment has reached the end of its lease, and newer systems will cost less on a monthly basis. Much of it ends up shipped overseas to be scrapped, with very negative environmental consequences in those localities. 

Offerings like Lenovo’s asset recovery services (ARS) ensure that an end-of-life system is reused as much as possible, with as small a portion of the system being scrapped. Users receive a welcome cash injection, and Lenovo can use the core materials, which have lower environmental impact than virgin materials, to recycle into the next generation of products.    

Data centres and the future 

The demand for computing power to drive business intelligence and scientific breakthroughs is only going to intensify. In the past, IT folks were given one command: ‘Get it (whatever “it” was) running as soon as possible!’ Today, they are being asked to balance that drive for IT results with helping achieve the enterprise’s ESG goals.  

To genuinely have a longer lasting, meaningful impact, IT leaders must take a holistic view of the product from development to end-of-life, using asset recovery services to find the most sustainable way for products to be reused and recycled to find a pathway to sustainability success. For business leaders, choosing the environmentally friendly option to refurbish or recycle is also a great way to drive a better bottom line, saving money on IT while also helping to save the planet.