THINK GREEN

ALAA BAWAB, GENERAL MANAGER, LENOVO INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTIONS GROUP (ISG), MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA, ON FIVE SUSTAINABILITY PRIORITIES FOR A ‘GREENER’ DATA CENTRE.

With the UAE being announced as host of the COP28 talks in 2023, and Saudi Arabia committing to reach net zero by 2060, environmental issues have never been higher on the agenda in the region. For many businesses, sustainability has joined efficiency, flexibility and resilience as their chief priorities.

In the post-lockdown economy enterprises are embracing the opportunity to integrate sustainability into the fabric of their data centre operations, both as a business win and for the benefit of society, and to define their pathway to zeroemission computing.

Sustainability isn’t only about taking incremental steps to reduce carbon emissions and resource consumption. It’s a mindset that permeates organisational culture, and as IT organisations, we have a collective responsibility to set the benchmarks and operate in a way that creates a positive impact on workforces, society, and the environment.

Enterprise decision makers need to balance the growing demand for IT with rising expectations around environmentally responsible operations. Here are five areas of focus that can help align data centre operations with sustainability goals.

Reduce the resource impact of data

Data is growing at an exponential rate. While the potential utility of data makes it a powerful asset, a lack of strategy around its accumulation can quickly turn it into a liability. Currently, around 1% of global electricity is used to power data centres and as we progress towards a world where data is projected to grow to 463 exabytes of data created every day by 2025, electricity consumption could multiply rapidly. The energy impact goes beyond just the electrical. According to a US Government report, a data centre will need on average around 1.8litres of water for every kWh consumed, predominantly for air conditioning purposes.

As part of reducing resource consumption, enterprises should consider moving the infrastructure that underpins their data operations, towards infrastructure built with energy efficiency in mind.

For example, we recommend Liquid Cooling Technology for larger data centres to reduce energy consumption by up to 40%, whilst maintaining uncompromised performance. More energy efficient servers benchmarked by SPECPower, and software platforms like Energy Aware Runtime (EAR) that manage power consumption, can also make a difference.

Create a circular product lifecycle

The circular economy is the name given to reducing the use of materials and energy in manufacturing products and recovering as much of the end products as possible through reuse and recycling. In the data center industry, many thousands of servers and other hardware are deemed to be ‘end of life’ each year. To reduce the risk of environmentally damaging waste, the industry needs to set a high bar in terms of recycling, reusing or repairing 100% of equipment stopping it from ending up as landfill.

Set aggressive targets

Becoming a sustainable business requires accountability. This can be done by committing to stakeholders to meet high standards and industry-recognised sustainability standards. Once you set your targets, there’s no backing away. We discovered the success of this approach more than a decade ago, setting the 2020 target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40% - a target we surpassed through a 92% reduction. We’ve now set our sights on a further 50% reduction by 2030. We have also signed up for the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), the first ever science-based Net-Zero Standard for emissions reduction which will combat the current inconsistencies that surround net-zero targets and enable consistent measurement and evaluation of a company’s emissions reduction.

Put measurement in place to track progress

It’s vital for today’s enterprises to get data center measurements under control. The range of metrics that can be tracked, such as water usage, electricity consumption and use of renewable energy, offer wide avenues for energy savings. Understanding how you’re measuring environmental efforts and what metrics you need to see moving in the right direction will help to show whether you are really making progress.

At Lenovo we issue an annual report for ESG (Environmental, Societal and Governance) that ensures we are tracking our goals, meeting our climate-change mitigation targets and generally measuring what matters most for the business and for society as a whole.

Optimise your supply chain

Data centres, like any complex structure, are reliant on robust supply chains to replace any failed hardware. Unanticipated downtime can result in wasted energy, so companies need to consider their supply chains to cut costs, strengthen business and mitigate environmental risks.

This includes incorporating transport methods and reducing the distance that products travel along a supply chain. By distributing production to more local facilities, such as we have done with our new factory near Budapest in Hungary, companies can cut the number of steps and dependencies required to get the product from factory to customer and lower the fuel consumption required as a result.

THE FUTURE OF DATABASE SYSTEMS

PAULO PEREIRA, SENIOR DIRECTOR, SYSTEMS ENGINEERING – METI AT NUTANIX ADVISES ENTERPRISES TO FOLLOW A SOFTWARE-DEFINED APPROACH TO DATA SERVICES IN ORDER TO BUILD AN INVISIBLE DATA INFRASTRUCTURE.

Adata-driven culture is needed if a business wants to lead through digital innovation. But traditional data management infrastructures are rigid and unable to combine diverse data types. Then there is the challenge of storing, managing and securing growing volumes of data and extracting insights out of it. Throw in cloud data and the fact that data is moving closer to the application and the user, and it becomes a hotbed of poorly managed databases sullying the role of analytics.

Those organisations that are unable to access accurate, timely, relevant, and reliable information from their data run a legacy datacentre infrastructure based on proprietary SAN arrays and storage fabric networks. These “hardware-defined” datacentres are, in essence, the first problem. What is needed is a data services platform that supports open architecture and is maximally available, assuring business of continuous access and insights from the data, where the infrastructure itself is effectively invisible to users.

To turn data into a competitive advantage, one needs to understand that data comes from different business areas and needs to be organised in three primary ways, namely relational databases, unstructured data, and high-velocity data. Because data is diverse, its collection often results in the formation of silos or individual repositories and as there is no cohesion between these sources because storage formats and data types differ.

Once data is organised, silos can be eliminated by adhering to open standards, adopting open paradigms, offering choice, and avoiding lock-in to users, customers, and operators alike. This helps the business firstly bring in all data types and secondly consume the data – or in this case, use the data to glean insights for improved business decision-making.

Maximally Available Infrastructure

Making infrastructure maximally calls for systems that can self-heal, dynamically adjust the write path to suit the workload, and dynamically apply data transforms based on heuristics.

Maximally available data is simple to manage through a central management plane that offers end-toend capabilities around alerting, events, and monitoring. It brings data closer to analytics – which is where it should be.

But what do we mean? Let’s look at a traditional database environment where an application or database update may lead to issues across systems. Here DBAs take a snapshot before each update if they need to roll back to an ideal state. With a maximally available data architecture, this can be avoided entirely, and any upgrades to underlying infrastructure supporting your data are continuous without interruption to services. Now, adding capacity for storage or performance, or performing a software update, is seamless and non-disruptive to your data services.

Traditional database management is done through an error-prone siloed approach to provisioning or cloning, which is time-consuming and makes troubleshooting exceptionally difficult. With an invisible data infrastructure, you know that the environment is integrated with your automation tools and gives DBAs the ability to create a self-service catalogue and perform delegation that controls who gets access, what they get access to (provision, clone, patch etc.), how much (storage, RAM, vCPU), and for how long (spin-down of resources).

Companies do not have the time or the resources to perform these functions manually in this digitally connected world. There are too many moving parts (applications). Today’s DBAs must be able to copy/paste a particular database instance and create clones from any point in time.

To build an invisible data infrastructure, your organisation must follow a software-defined approach to data services. By adding the tools needed to architect an invisible plane that can orchestrate the functions of your databases, your business can unify how data is stored and consumed with a data services platform that is open, operative, and opaque and is supported both on-premises or in the public cloud.

Using integrated database management software, you can automate and simplify management, enjoy one-click simplicity and invisible operations to database provisioning, lifecycle and copy data management. In essence, this platform paves the way to the advantages inherent in Databases as a Service (DBaaS).

The benefit to your business is an end-to-end environment for structured and unstructured data with raw storage in a cloud-like experience with full APIfirst automation and self-service.