Driving adoption, experimentation, and innovation towards aggressive climate action
Today, the OCP Foundation, the nonprofit organization bringing hyperscale innovations to all, announced Sustainability as a new top-level project and as the 5th Tenet to ensure that all work efforts across all OCP Projects have a focus on sustainability, as a core action, that is designed in from the start. OCP’s Sustainability top-level project will set reporting targets, monitor and plan compliance with external regulations and best practices, develop high level sustainability KPIs that go beyond traditional data center measures such as power usage effectiveness (PUE), and assemble sustainability technology and process roadmaps for the larger OCP Community to follow under the OCP’s new Sustainability Tenet.
Sustainability efforts carried out across the OCP will focus on technology specific implementations of the directions set by its new OCP Sustainability Project. Currently within the OCP there are sustainability efforts in cooling environments involving increasing thermal management efficiency with liquid based cooling technologies such as immersion and cold plate cooling and heat re-use. Beyond thermal optimizations, data center facilities efforts are working to optimize carbon associated from operations and data center facilities construction, and the manufacturing of IT equipment. Designing for circularity is also an important focus to positively control the lifecycle of IT physical infrastructure. For example, firmware needs to be open to promote reuse and improve long term sustainability. OCP hardware specifications will continue to evolve to enable products to remain in use for as long as possible, and design for circularity to enable infrastructure within the data center to be repurposed, and ultimately enable component and material recovery when decommissioned.
"The OCP community has a responsibility to contribute towards reducing the environmental impact of the industry, and drive conversations within their influence to impact technologies deployed in the data centers. The tenets of the OCP foster openness that enables mainstream delivery of the most efficient designs for scalable computing and uniquely positions OCP to be an effective agent for climate action. Adding a mandate for sustainability looking at transparency, circularity, and embodied carbon in IT equipment, silicon and data center facilities will add significant weight to our ability to help the industry minimize its impact on the environment," said George Tchaparian, CEO Open Compute Project Foundation.
To decouple the industry’s predicted growth from its environmental impact, the hyperscale and colocation data center industry will need to accelerate existing and future sustainability strategies and solutions to reduce overall environmental impact. OCP believes it can have the most effective and immediate impact on supply chain by developing standardized metrics and promotion of data transparency across value chain, standards for transfer of ownership, by helping to embed circularity from the early life cycle/design stages across the range of IT infrastructure, including building facilities and IT equipment, and with education and awareness.
About the Open Compute Project Foundation
At the core of the open compute project (OCP) is its community of hyperscale data center operators, joined by telecom and colocation providers and enterprise IT users, working with vendors to develop open innovations that when embedded in product are deployed from the cloud to the edge. The OCP Foundation is responsible for fostering and serving the OCP community to meet the market and shape the future, taking hyperscale led innovations to everyone. Meeting the market is accomplished through open designs and best practices, and with data center facility and IT equipment embedding OCP community developed innovations for efficiency, at-scale operations, and sustainability. Shaping the future includes investing in strategic initiatives that prepares the IT ecosystem for major changes, such as AI & ML, optics, advanced cooling techniques, and composable silicon. Learn more at www.opencompute.org.