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It is necessary at this point to incorporate circular strategies at every business level to reduce the pace of material depletion and the growing e-waste crisis . shows how essential it is for data centres to employ efficient servers that are fit to their needs .
The materials perspective
However , PUE only captures the site ’ s infrastructural efficiency improvements over time and doesn ’ t give any indication about the efficiency of IT equipment , which remain the biggest energy consumers in data centres .
Often , IT energy information and utilisation rates remain hidden . The ISO / IEC 30134 series defined two KPIs designated for IT efficiency : IT Equipment Energy Efficiency for servers ( ITEEsv ) and IT Equipment Utilization for servers ( ITEUsv ). Although some hyperscalers such as Amazon , Google and Facebook claim that most of their energy efficiency gains are attributed to using more energyefficient servers ( that in some cases are custom-built ) and higher utilisation rates , yet , unlike PUE , we don ’ t see ITEEsv and ITEUsv figures published in their sustainability reports .
This is mainly due to the complexity and time-consuming nature of setting up and measuring the server ’ s energy efficiency using SERT benchmark as specified by the ISO standard , and having to re-test the server every time it ’ s reconfigured .
Machine Learning solution
In 2020 , Interact was developed to help data centres realise their servers ’ energy efficiency without needing to run SERT on every single server on their site . The tool is based on Machine Learning and is trained using published SPECpower results as well as in-house benchmarking results to give power and performance estimates for any server configuration with high accuracy . For a given data centre , the tool provided a server refresh recommendation that resulted in an estimated total energy reduction of 70 %. By replacing existing servers with more efficient models , big savings were attained , not only in the total operational energy , but also in associated carbon emissions , cost and rack space . This
Besides energy waste , a less talked about concern is material depletion . Data centre buildings and their IT and cooling equipment are material extensive . Historically , data centres have not been vigilant about their materials selection
Nour Rteil , Lead Application Developer at Techbuyer
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