Tackling Sustainability with Eco-friendly, Green Hardware

OpenInfra Live is a weekly hour-long interactive show streaming to the OpenInfra YouTube channel every Thursday at 14:00 UTC (9:00 AM CT). Episodes feature more OpenInfra release updates, user stories, community meetings, and more open infrastructure stories.

Join us as we discuss how chipmakers, hardware vendors, and data center architects are all working in concert to solve this problem.

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Jimmy McArthur, senior manager of community & business development at the OpenInfra Foundation, hosted this week’s episode of OpenInfra Live and drove a compelling discussion with the organizations that are combatting climate change in the open source community. In a time when we are faced with questions about climate change and a lack of global policy agreement, organizations like Intel, Ampere Computing, Equinix, and Exaion are spearheading the green computing initiative.

The Green Hardware Initiative

John Miranda, director, strategy office, data platforms group at Intel Corporation, kicked off with a brief introduction to what the green computing movement is. “Sustainability has risen to the forefront of topics [Intel] is following,” said Miranda. Moreover, it has been on the forefront of topics discussed globally. Society has been talking about sustainability for decades, but especially in the last year the topic has received a sharp focus. Regulatory pressure within the industry and from investors is on the rise, said Miranda. This has led to the adoption of global neutrality popping up around the globe. However this poses the question: How do we get there?

We have determined that the sustainability of the Earth is vital. But what is the first step and the dozens of steps after? This is where organizations like chip manufacturers, silicon makers, and data center operators can come in to innovate and most importantly collaborate, because no one company can turn the ecosystem around.

OCP is hosting their global summit November 9 & 10 with a whole track dedicated to sustainability.

Ampere Computing Use Case

Peter Pouliot, senior developer advocate at Ampere Computing, discussed Ampere’s initiatives to build dense data centers at the edge with more efficient chips. Pouliot mentioned that Ampere has seen success in this area. They have been working with Oregon State University’s Open Source Labs. Pouliot shared that when Ampere Computing’s first generation processors were installed at Oregon State University’s Open Source Labs, they were so power efficient that when installed they thought they were broken, but rather they just used minimal power.

Equinix Use Case

Zachary Smith, managing director at Equinix, highlighted the complexities of tackling the challenges of innovating for climate change. Equinix, the world’s largest interconnected data center operator, has stated a target of carbon neutrality by 2030 using science targets. Smith mentioned that with this set goal they have seen their customers are pushing products with reduced carbon impact, more sustainable technologies, and technologies with longer lives.

Smith also addressed the issue of cooling. Equinix has innovated to standardize liquid cooling couplers at facility scale that can work with a variety of silicon and server manufacturers. Liquid cooling to remove heat from the server, reduce fan waste, improve performance, and reduce the water usage associated with evaporator cooling. In order to hit their carbon neutral science target, Equinix needs to figure out how to capture the heat produced by servers and use it or sell it.

Exaion Use Case

Laurent Bernou-Mazars, CTO & co-founder at Exaion, shared Exaion’s parent company, EDF group’s, ‘raison d’être.’ The EDF group exists to build a net zero energy future with electricity and innovative solutions and services, to help save the planet and drive wellbeing and economic development.

This is a big challenge, said Bernou-Mazars. Exaion has stepped up to the challenges of climate change by using carbon electricity and giving a second life to existing hardware. Bernou-Mazars stated, around 75% of the carbon footprint of IT equipment is due to producing and managing the end of life of equipment.

Next Episode on #OpenInfraLive

Join us on Thursday, November 4 at 1400 UTC (9:00 AM CT) to watch the next OpenInfra Live episode: OpenInfra in Production: Hybrid Cloud. The hybrid cloud marketing is expected to reach $145 billion USD by 2026 and organizations worldwide are deploying a combination of open source and proprietary tools in production for this use case. Join us on OpenInfra Live as we kick off a series of episodes to talk about the organizations deploying hybrid cloud environments, the technologies they’re working with and the vendors who are supporting the production use cases.

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Tags: Ampere Computing, Equinix, Exaion, Green Computing, Intel, OpenStack