Decarbonizing data centers is a topic we have been discussing for many years. Just doing a quick search, I found a few articles I wrote over a decade ago in 2011 about data center decarbonization efforts. However, the discussion of the topic is usually kept fairly simple, focusing on how much electricity a company or data center receives from renewable energy sources. I recently met with several data center decarbonization experts from Hitachi’s Environmental Business Department to learn more, and it turns out they made the topic more fun and interesting than I expected!
Before we start decarbonizing the data center, let’s start with some background.
I had this conversation with Jody Heyroth, Chief Operating Officer of the Hitachi Environmental Business Unit, and Justin Bean, who works on solution and strategy innovation, sustainability and ESG in the Hitachi Environmental Business Unit. Jody noted that even though Hitachi has been in business for nearly 112 years, it is always focused on the future and innovation. “We are an innovation-driven business,” he said. “We have a mission to contribute to society by developing superior, original technology and products.” Hitachi manufactures a wide range of products: automotive equipment, bullet train technology, computer storage equipment, healthcare technology, power grid technology, and more. It is also deeply involved in the software side of these industries.
Data Center Decarbonization Challenges and Common Solutions
A focus on innovation and continuous improvement is emphasized when Jody and Justin talk about decarbonizing the data center. To get you started, here’s a good overview of the main problems and common solutions from Jodi’s perspective:
“The challenge facing data center operators today is figuring out how to balance this continued growth. How can they get more than that existing facility, right—the footprint of that facility, the power supply of that facility? But then also, as they go and build new data centers, to ensure that they’re built with that whole sustainability mindset. Do you know if data centers can be more sustainable? Yes, absolutely.
“They can get power from renewable energy sources like wind, solar and geothermal. They can use efficient solutions to move electricity from the grid to the equipment. They may also have more efficient server and network and storage equipment. And when we talk about the type of efficiency here, we’re thinking about the physical footprint (how much space this equipment takes up), what the energy consumption is, and so on. what is the heat generated? Because as most people know, the problem with data centers is all the IT equipment in there – it creates massive the amount of heat and how you manage it and manage it to protect the equipment, but do it efficiently.
“But we can’t forget about applications — you know, they’re the real consumers of the data center. We can be more efficient design and the flexibility of our applications so they can consume right in its resources right time right place to truly minimize their impact on the environment.
Accessing Details of Decarbonization Data Centers
Jody and Justin then get more granular. We cover IT equipment monitoring, carbon impact analysis of dedicated servers, reallocation of resources to minimize operational carbon impact and more. We discuss the direct construction or purchase of renewable energy versus the purchase of emissions offsets or renewable energy credits. We discuss – at a real, deep level – the internal and various external pressures on corporations to become more sustainable. After talking a bit about detailed equipment-level scaling, as more and more customers want to save energy and decarbonize, Jody also highlighted the growing role of tracking results.
“There is this element of responsibility and accountability. You should be able to measure and realize, “Okay, great, I did that project, I upgraded that piece of equipment—did it move the needle the way I expected?” and can really understand the impact. And that’s actually something we’re starting to see more and more as organizations go to achieve these sustainability goals and initiatives, it’s going to take investment, but is it the right investment for the right long-term benefit? For that investment, that now means that data center managers and sustainability managers need to be able to communicate those stories to the C-suite to explain and defend the case for that investment and the sustainability investment case. he was able to take them there.”
I asked about the difficulty of continuing to operate existing equipment and trying to optimize one after the other versus when to buy new, more efficient equipment and scrap old equipment. Justin responded thoughtfully and in good detail:
“Yeah, yeah, there’s some kind of tension there, isn’t there? So they might want to move to a more efficient infrastructure, but that’s going to take up a lot of carbon, right? And all that equipment takes a lot of time to set up and assemble and transport, and so they don’t want to just kind of rip it out and replace it completely, but they’re going to want to figure out if it’s optimal to replace it—because they’re going. anyway to replace this hardware – But with the right tools, analytics, and data, they can understand when that infrastructure makes sense to replace, is starting to degrade operationally, and is starting to consume more electricity and have more emissions associated with it. the point where you want to replace it with something more efficient.
“And so it’s really helpful to have these tools so that they know when it’s the right time to replace it and understand what that embodied carbon is and what e-waste is going to be for them — because that’s a big part of that, in the world.” e-waste is huge and data centers also contribute to it.
It’s a Journey, a Multifaceted Approach
To kind of sum it up, Jody says, “When we think about sustainability and improving data center operations, you know it’s really a multifaceted approach. I think you have to think about it in terms of power supply — so where do you get your primary power for your data center, what does your local utility supply; What might be available based on where your facility is located? […] You should also think about this relative to your backup power supply. You have to think about it in terms of power equipment, right? So looking at that transformer equipment, looking at and understanding how you’re getting power from the meter to your IT racks in your data center. It is also about construction infrastructure. So this is thinking about it in terms of your HVAC systems providing overall cooling and temperature management for the facility. This is the IT infrastructure, i.e. server, network and storage equipment. It’s applications. It’s the people in the process.
“Now that seems like a lot, doesn’t it? (LOL) But these are all aspects that you would consider in terms of the type of data center – sort of in terms of overall health or overall resiliency. But you know, do you have to solve everything at once? Nope. It’s a road trip, or maybe a marathon, or if there’s a better analogy, it’s more like an urban adventure race. (LOL)”
Fun! It’s like going to Disney World
Justin also emphasized the fun of the process: “There are also new innovations that come out pretty quickly. Like the rest of the tech sector, there is one tone there’s a ton of new capabilities coming to the fore in the industry in terms of innovation—things like immersion cooling, which actually immerses your infrastructure in a cooler, a liquid cooler. [There are] All these different ways of approaching a problem can be a really interesting way. There are many new AI models to control HVAC systems and applications and all that. There are also different ways to do this. You want to transfer your account to someone else geography at a certain time of day? Is there a strategy you can take in such operations to manage and store data? Do you need some things at this point and other points – it’s a bit like power management, where you want to use battery power when electricity is expensive and use grid power when it’s cheap. […]
“It’s really about figuring out how much you’re spending on electricity, where the savings might be. It can be something very simple. We recently spoke with a data center that put some plastic curtains around certain parts of the data center to change heat flow, and it gave them a huge reduction in energy costs – in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. So there are all kinds of interesting things you can do that can save you millions of dollars, make you tens of thousands, or just make your life a lot easier because it’s so easy to send your report to sustainability. manager explaining what your emissions are and then what your plan is to reduce them.
I jokingly (but I really love this metaphor) compared it to going to Disney World. “I think we can say it’s a lot exactly Like going to Disney World – that’s basically what you’re saying here. A great course, a great adventure awaits you; you have various technological innovations, it is exciting; sometimes you have a headache, you are tired; you have to plan your projects — ‘we’ll tackle this now, we’ll tackle that later’; you can explore different worlds. I was going to joke before, then you added to it. “That’s a perfect metaphor,” I said. The only thing you don’t have is yelling at kids, but if you work from home, you probably do – you’re a techie, right?
There’s more on the podcast. Listen to the entire discussion to learn more about comprehensive, efficient and thoughtful decarbonization of data centers.
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