According to Supermicro, the majority of datacentre leaders continue to not fully consider green initiatives for the growing buildout of datacentre infrastructure, leading to not only increasing costs but also an impact on the environment.
The finding comes from the 2nd Annual Datacentres and the Environment Report. It involves an industry survey of over 5000 IT professionals based all over the world, and assesses the purchase considerations of datacentre equipment in order to help datacentre leaders better quantify decisions for long-term environmental impact through energy savings and e-waste reductions.
Most businesses (86%) across the board, be it SMBs, large enterprises or recognised companies, do not consider the environmental impact of their facilities as an important factor for the datacentres. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) or Return on Investment (ROI) are the primary measures of success, and less than 15% of respondents think energy efficiency, corporate social responsibility or environmental impact are a key consideration. In addition, 22% say "environmental considerations" are too expensive to be considered a priority, pointing out a significant lack of understanding of the ROI of green computing solutions.
Around 90% of datacentres are not designed for optimal Power Effectiveness, potentially costing each datacentre over $1.4 million annually according to national averages. In the meantime companies are still moving to colder ambient temperatures for datacentres, despite novel cooling techniques and hardware able to handle higher operating temperatures. In fact, compared to 2018 the number of businesses keeping facilities and servers below 24°C is up by 13%, making it over 66% of respondents.
Many companies also operate datacentres at lower densities than necessary, since 71% of respondents note their datacentres run at power densities below 19W per rack. Multinode servers and operating at higher power densities could both improve energy requirements and decrease costs. Also worth pointing out is how the number of companies recycling decommissioned hardware is down in 2019, and around 10% of the largest enterprises with the most datacentre hardware are still throwing away decommissioned equipment without any recycling.
Supermicro offers Resource-Saving architecture to disaggregate the CPU, memory and other subsystems, allowing for the independent refresh of each resource. This should reduce refresh cycle costs, as well as the impact on the environment.
