Techbuyer Group has announced the launch of an energy optimisation software tool which allows the data centre industry to better address the climate change risk. The tool, which goes to market under the brand name ‘Interact, is the culmination of a two-year research and development partnership between Techbuyer and the University of East London.
Interact delivers previously unseen energy optimisation recommendations at component and system level for data centre server hardware, allowing stakeholders to reduce their carbon footprint, limit emissions, and achieve expenditure and operational cost savings. With the data centre sector responsible for a significant percentage of worldwide energy consumption – and expected to grow 500% globally by 2030 – carbon optimisation is essential.
In simple terms, the Interact tool allows users to identify their optimal server configurations in terms of performance and energy efficiency as per individual requirements. The tool will recommend both new and refurbished options, whichever is best for client requirements. Cost savings can be enormous. A recent case study of 770 servers delivered potential savings of £200,000 in year one and £480,000 in years two and three.
Carbon savings were over 460,000kg of CO2 equivalent on the running costs, and much more than that on supply chain carbon. The use of refurbished machines avoids almost a metric ton of the emissions involved in mining, manufacture and transport of the new equivalent. Most of the climate change agenda focuses on use phase, but there is a growing appreciation of the importance of reuse as well.
The Interact tool began as an Innovate UK supported collaboration between Techbuyer and the University of East London. The academic supervisor, Rabih Bashroush, is a world leader in the field of energy efficiency for data centre IT hardware who recently featured on Channel 4 Dispatches.
Lead developer and researcher, Nour Rteil, carried out months of component level experiments that enabled the team to create a smart tool that analyses component and rack level server solutions to optimise cost, energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. Her research has led to a paper co-authored by Nour, Rabih Bashroush, Techbuyer Group IT Director Rich Kenny and Techbuyer Sustainability Lead Astrid Wynne in the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Transactions on Sustainable Computing. The peer-reviewed research outlined the effect of a declining Moore’s Law on data centre IT refresh.
“The IEEE paper represents peer-reviewed evidence that it makes perfect sense to refresh with properly configured refurbished servers for energy efficiency as well as reduced environmental footprint. This is the first time this has been done. The Interact tool builds on that with machine learning smart software to give the most effective energy and cost saving solution for IT refresh – be that through replacing existing infrastructure with new or refurbished server configurations or through upgrading existing configurations instead ,” says Rich Kenny, Global IT Director for Techbuyer and Directory of Strategy for Interact.
