Supermicro Report Highlights Environmental Impact of Today’s Cloud-Scale Data Centers
SAN JOSE, Calif., Dec. 18, 2018 — Super Micro Computer, Inc. (SMCI), a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions and green computing technology, today released its first annual “Data Centers and The Environment” survey report.
The rapid growth of large-scale data centers brings both business and environmental challenges to datacenter managers. The report is targeted to help datacenter managers better understand the industry norms around environmental impact, provide quantitative comparisons of their peer group and ultimately help datacenter managers reduce the environmental impact of their data centers.
The report highlights the need for IT managers to quantify the real impact data centers can have on the environment and some of the opportunities to significantly minimize 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%).
The report helps companies connect corporate environmental strategies with their datacenter growth challenges. 58% of businesses already have an environmental policy in place, but only 28% of respondents consider environmental issues in the selection of datacenter technology. Similarly, only 9% indicated energy efficiency as the top criterion when setting datacenter design strategy.
The report documents the usage of power efficiency metrics in the data center and peer group comparisons to help datacenter managers benchmark their performance. 59% of respondents considered power efficiency as “extremely important” or “important” to their actual datacenter 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 datacenter facility to the energy delivered to the IT equipment. For those that did measure PUE, 22% have an average datacenter 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 1 in 10 businesses have not yet implemented an equipment recycling program to help limit E-Waste. 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 centers 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 lifecycle 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 datacenter investments while at the same time minimizing the environmental impacts of these data centers.”
Supermicro’s Resource-Saving architecture disaggregates the CPU and memory as well as other subsystems, so each resource can be refreshed independently allowing data centers to reduce refresh cycle costs and their impact to the environment (TCE). When viewed over a three to five year refresh cycle, Supermicro Resource-Saving servers deliver, on-average, higher-performing and more-efficient servers at lower costs than traditional rip-and-replace models by allowing data centers to independently optimize adoption of new and improved technologies.
To learn more about the report findings and Supermicro’s Resource-Saving innovations and commitment to green computing, please visit www.supermicro.com/WeKeepITGreen.