How APAC organisations can drive IT sustainability

AI and liquid cooling

AI will touch everything, suggests Hirst, and datacentres are central to training and inferencing. This means improvements in IT sustainability will have a big global effect. On the other hand, AI should improve business efficiency, and that will result in environmental gains which offset the additional datacentre power consumption caused by running AI models. For example, Macquarie Data Centres is looking to use AI for predictive maintenance, which should improve efficiency.

Hirst says the growth in AI, the internet of things and other technologies means higher densities in datacentres, and therefore more cooling. Looking at GPUs alone, the power consumption per chip is increasing tenfold – power draws of 1kW per chip is on the way. This suggests loads of as much as 80kW per rack, and air cooling is insufficient once you go above 30kW.

Instead, liquid cooling is needed, whether that’s direct to chip, immersion, or some other arrangement, and this will bring “a big change to the datacentre industry”. At the Macquarie Park datacentre campus, for example, Macquarie deployed a custom-built immersion cooling environment optimised for Submer’s liquid cooling technology over the space of a few months.

Several Fujitsu datacentre tenants are also running projects involving immersion cooling. Among the issues noted by Dudley are that vendors sometimes deny warranty coverage for equipment that has been immersion cooled. And equipment sold as being suitable for immersion cooling can merely be a stripped down and over-priced version of a regular product. Additionally, the liquid used for immersion cooling still has to be cooled, just as with air cooling.

Liquid cooling to the chip is less dramatic, as it involves piping water to cool components that run particularly hot, such as GPUs. One example is Lenovo’s Neptune Direct to Node cooling system, which is up to 40% more efficient than traditional fan cooling, according to Scott Tease, Lenovo’s vice-president and general manager of high-performance computing and AI. The company also offers a water-cooled rear door heat exchanger that cools hot air as it leaves the rack and is 3.5 times more efficient than air alone.

The industry is still working on the PUE implications of high-density workloads such as AI. They will still be efficient even if PUEs become slightly worse, says Hirst, noting that more-efficient algorithms and coding also have a part to play. Not only do they allow results to be obtained more quickly – they also improve the overall efficiency of the datacentre for a given set of workloads.

Commvault’s Creighan says containing data proliferation and limiting data movement can help to improve efficiency as well, citing a third-party study which found that Commvault’s Metallic data protection system can help customers shift power consumption to more efficient systems.

Furthermore, it found that customers could reduce their data footprints by up to 38% due to its ability to reserve and use the proper type of storage, as well as taking advantage of more-efficient cloud-based infrastructure and storage.

Tapping green energy sources

Some of the measures taken to improve datacentre sustainability may seem pedestrian but are still of value. Macquarie Data Centres is using solar panels, rainwater harvesting and in cooler climates, natural cold air induction to reduce carbon footprint. The company is also upgrading older datacentres to extend their useful lives, reducing the amount of equipment going to landfill.

On-site solar panels can replace mains electricity to a small extent. While Fujitsu’s Eight Mile Plains datacentre in Brisbane has a 99kW rooftop solar system, that only represents around 3% of the facility’s total electricity consumption.

So, Fujitsu is working to procure renewable energy. While more than 50% of the electricity currently used by all of Fujitsu’s operations in Australia comes from renewable sources, there are limits on availability. The varying carbon intensity of electricity generation around the country is also a consideration.

Fujitsu uses renewable energy power purchase agreements (PPAs) as a way of directly reducing its carbon footprint as opposed to offset arrangements. The current agreements are for wind power, but the company wants to add solar providers as that will “flatten out the line of availability of renewable power”, according to Dudley.

Looking ahead, Dudley says work is underway to develop micro nuclear reactors that fit into shipping containers and generate up to 20MW of electricity, allowing datacentres to be decoupled from the grid and potentially changing their locations. “We certainly need to find a solution that isn’t coal or gas, as wind and solar aren’t enough,” he adds.

Datacentres are often the focus of a lot of attention and have, for example, been targeted by climate emergency, Dudley says. That said, he notes that the power consumption of datacentres around the world has increased by just 4% over a period when the compute power they deliver has grown a hundredfold.

Craig Somerville, executive general manager of his eponymous IT service provider, says his company uses sustainability as a selection criterion when choosing a datacentre.

A datacentre that ran on 100% renewable power would be a game changer, he says, but while some operators are moving in the right direction, loads have already increased from 2-4kW per rack to 8-12kW. He suggests that hydrogen powered generators might be the answer to meet these heavy loads.

The main barrier to improving Somerville’s sustainability is that the company can only use what’s on offer. But making sustainability a selection criterion should influence vendors to make the right changes.

Recycling hardware

Somerville now pays attention to hardware vendors’ sustainability practices and uses mostly HP and HPE equipment as they have a long history of promoting sustainability. Almost every piece of hardware they sell is recyclable, with just 1-2% of the materials going to landfill.

Fujitsu works with a partner to handle and separate its waste responsibly, including waste from its customers’ on-site activities. The company has had a policy of sending zero e-waste to landfill since 2009, with items being refurbished where possible and the rest sent for recycling.

Macquarie Data Centres also works with its customers to recycle as much as possible, including the packaging in which new equipment is delivered.

Manufacturers can play a part too. In 2019, Lenovo started shipping pre-assembled racks instead of separately packaged server nodes, chassis and racks, reducing the amount of cardboard packaging per rack by around 48kg.

At the other end of the cycle, Lenovo’s asset recovery services programme securely handles collection, erasure or destruction of storage devices, the sale or donation of refurbished equipment, and the recycling of what remains.

“Customers can be confident that Lenovo will help their business do its part to be environmentally and socially responsible, as well as maximise the recoverable value for all their technology assets,” says Tease.

A surprising source of recyclable materials is old tapes. Perth-based Tape Ark ‘liberates’ old tape-based backups and moves the data into the cloud, explains Guy Holmes, its president and CEO. The company built its virtual tape technology in the cloud, and so it can be turned off when not in active use, saving money and reducing energy consumption.

Tape Ark also reduces the total footprint of its customers’ operations. It recently moved data from 11 Australian hospitals into a single cloud-based repository, reducing power and cooling requirements while making the data more readily available.

One of the issues is that legislation requires some data to be retained for longer than the technology used would otherwise survive. An organisation that’s been in business since the 1980s might have eight different types of tape backups and would have abandoned most of them if it wasn’t for retention requirements. And so, moving the data to the cloud is an evergreen solution, Holmes says.

Tape Ark is now working with a shoe company on a plan to recycle the tape itself as well as its shell, leaving just a few metal components and a small circuit board from each cartridge to be disposed of. Having worked with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Holmes imagines turning old tapes into limited-edition shoes labelled with a QR code that links to a particular performer’s induction video.

Another benefit of Tape Ark’s approach is that it makes old data usable again. Holmes gave the example of the UK Meteorological Office, which has 350PB of data from weather modelling. That data can be combined with sea depth data collected by another organisation to help determine the best locations for offshore wind farms.

“The more data is in the cloud, especially historical data that was collected before the cloud became commonplace, the more opportunities there will be to exploit it, potentially turning that data from a cost to a source of revenue,” Holmes says.