Abstract
Demand for digital services is increasing significantly. Addressing energy efficiency at the data center mechanical and electrical infrastructure level is starting to suffer from the law of diminishing returns. IT equipment, specifically servers, account for a significant part of the overall facility energy consumption and environmental impact, and thus, present a major opportunity, not the least from a circular economy perspective. To reduce the environmental impact of servers, it is important to realize the effect of manufacturing, operating, and disposing of servers on the environment. This work presents new insights into the effect of refreshing servers with remanufactured and refurbished servers on energy efficiency and the environment. The research takes into consideration the latest changes in CPU design trends and Moore's law. The study measures and analyzes the use phase energy consumption of remanufactured servers vs new servers with various hardware configurations. Case studies are used to evaluate the potential impact of refurbished server refresh from an economic as well as environmental perspectives.
Highlights
PEOPLE and organizations rely heavily on digital services, to the extent that the annual global Internet traffic in 2017 was estimated to be 1.5 ZB, and is expected to reach 4.8 ZB by 2022 [1]
In previous work, we studied the optimal server refresh cycles along with the environmental impact associated with procuring new servers vs prolonging the life of the existing kit [8]
According to the EURECA study [4], which examined over 300 European data centers, 40% of deployed servers are older than 5 years, yet, they consume 66% of the overall facility energy and contribute 7% of the compute capacity
Summary
PEOPLE and organizations rely heavily on digital services, to the extent that the annual global Internet traffic in 2017 was estimated to be 1.5 ZB, and is expected to reach 4.8 ZB by 2022 [1]. The infrastructure encompasses the servers, storage, and networking devices as well as the supporting mechanical and electrical plants This amplified demand for computing power creates a global environmental challenge. Energy consumption for data centers was estimated to be 103 TWh in Europe in 2014 [3] and rose to 130 TWh in 2017 [4], an average increase of approximately 25% over 3 years. This equated to 5% of the electricity consumption in Europe. This paper studies the environmental and performance impact of the slowdown in technological advances on server refresh, and its implication on employing circular economy practices (e.g. use of refurbished/remanufactured servers vs new servers).
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