Key Themes/Ideas

Need a public mindset shift: data has mass and a carbon footprint. (The video of your kid eating cheerios has a carbon footprint!)

Need to account for total cost of ownership

Need hardware to be more resilient to temp, environmental fluctuations

What about water and e-waste? These environmental/human health impacts are currently overlooked.

Collaboration and info sharing as an industry is a critical need

What is the best/most accurate metric? DCEP data center efficiency ... ?

"Tech refresh," i.e., replacing technology for consolidation of computing power is a key idea. By updating your servers you can reduce the total power demand for a given amount of computing.



Notes from Discussion

What is the net benefit of a data center design or operational change? How do you measure it? Utilization of computing resources, and effectiveness from the perspective of end user functionality. Software is a part of the picture. Microsoft can be considered an environmental offender because of the inefficiency of their code.

Focus of data center designers is reliability - design is extremely robust. A server tower will have two power supplies, a given power supply will have two UPSs, etc. etc. Lots of room for "right-sizing."

Need better metrics. PUE is not good enough. Need to account for actual carbon footprint, and total water demand.

Constantly question basic assumptions when designing a data center, with respect to the environment around the center - i.e., what is the outside temp? Passive cooling? Evaporative cooling?

People are most concerned about energy but water is also important. Large quantities of water are used in combustion and nuclear power generation as well as in data center cooling.

Additional important factors that should be considered regarding the energy/environmental effectiveness of a data center:

user behavior
software
redundancy, and the necessity of additional layers of redundancy

Needs to be better transparency and information sharing concerning data center operations and design within the industry. If the data center is not the core business, there's no reason to be protective or secretive about these practices.

Data center owners also need more honest reports from equipment vendors of reliability and lifetimes of their products, "mortality" rates at higher temps, etc. This could allow "tighter" design of the data center, elimination of some excessively robust design practices.

A third party could monitor the exchange of this information. EDF?





Resources

Green Grid white papers, online

Rocky Mountain Institute

UC San Diego - Systems Energy Efficiency Lab

NREL white paper should be coming out soon on compute efficiency, metrics