Summary
The data center industry is growing rapidly. New facilities, hosting powerful servers are created everywhere as the demands of the digital economy expand. However, the actual utilization rate of servers is often as low as 14% in on-premise locations, and as low as 40% in Cloud data centers. Billions of Euros in hardware are therefore being underutilized. With IT workloads becoming increasingly shiftable, new approaches are becoming possible.
Another consideration that needs to be taken into account when calulating resource and utilization efficiency is the total lifecycle costs. With hardware refresh rates as fast as three years, improving overall efficiency must include improving the life cycle resource utilization and energy consumption.
This group will work on measures to increase IT utilization rates, and improve wider energy and resource efficiency by considering the life cycle costs of IT hardware.
Current Challenges
- How do we factor in phyiscal redundancy & availability requirements into efficiency?
- What is needed to enable software-driven resource management and workload flexibility?
- How do we adopt an industry wide measurement for IT hardware utilization and efficiency?
- What regulatory environment would support the development of efficient resource consumption, with high utilization rates & optimized life cycle?
- What measures enable data center operators to manage their supply chains? Particularly with respect to sustainable manufacturing and life cycle assessments?
- How do Service Level Agreements (SLA's) look like that allow workloads to shift in time?
- How can new technologies that focus on utilization rates have a positive effect on Data Center energy consumption?
Working Group Goals
The overarching goal of this working group is to improve the overall lifecycle value of IT hardware within data centers, both by increasing the average workload utilization over time as well as extending the lifetime of the components.
- Utilization and Efficiency metrics are identified and accepted across the industry
- Resource & energy efficiency and lifecycle analyses of IT hardware is considered as standard by data center operators
- An open Spot Market allocates data center capacity between all market participants, both consumers and producers, in a highly efficient way