Sustainable Infrastructure Part 1: How to Be a Sustainability Star

As the environment affects the well-being of our future, I've always been passionate about ensuring its sustainability. However, it wasn't until recently that I recognized the integral role of technological innovation in progressing our path towards a more sustainable future. Take PowerEdge, for example. As generations of this platform have served and will continue to serve as the foundation of many large-scale data centers, even slight improvements in energy efficiency can significantly reduce their operators' electricity consumption and carbon footprint. Therefore, as a new GEOS team member, I was particularly delighted to learn about the sustainability innovations built into PowerEdge 15G and wanted to use this series to highlight these exciting advancements.

Before diving deeper into PowerEdge 15G, I thought we would use part one of this series to examine the most critical aspects of server sustainability and how operators can leverage this information to minimize their energy expenditures and waste. So, stay tuned for Part 2, and let's explore!

What aspects determine server sustainability?

As the engineers behind these vital workhorses, vendors like Dell play a critical role in determining the sustainability of a server. Apart from user behavior, the following aspects can notably impact server power requirements and should be given special consideration when designing or choosing models.

Due to their significant impact on server energy demand, the PowerEdge platform has invested heavily in improving the performance of these features with every generation. We will explore how PowerEdge 15G has advanced upon its predecessors in each of these aspects in part two.

How to operate servers responsibly

While vendors can help reduce power consumption by employing efficient design principles, the sustainability of a product also largely depends on user behavior. This dynamic is evident in other industries as well, such as that for consumer-packaged goods; despite the growing availability of recyclable packaging, most recyclable materials still end up in landfills or incinerators. Therefore, it is crucial to provide users with the necessary information and support to build and operate their data centers at the highest level of energy efficiency.

Helping users avoid the following pitfalls and employ best practices can help decrease a server’s carbon footprint and lower the cost of ownership by reducing electricity waste, hardware space requirements, and the likelihood of server underutilization.

How to be a Sustainability Star

Now that you have some insight into what it takes to build and administer energy-efficient data centers, it’s time to apply them. Besides ameliorating data center operations, the following actions can help enhance the sustainability of your entire network, including that of other important stakeholders in the supply chain.

Beyond these recommendations, by keeping energy-efficiency at the forefront of procurement considerations, avoiding pitfalls, and following best practices, you too can be a sustainability star!

Thanks for reading, and please watch out for Part 2 to learn more about the innovative sustainability features found specifically in PowerEdge 15G.