Towards Sustainable Low Carbon Emission Mini Data Centres
Ismael Samaye, Paul Leloup, Gilles Sassatelli, Abdoulaye Gamatié
TL;DR
The paper investigates sustainability challenges in mini data centres, focusing on e-waste from frequent server refreshes and reliance on carbon-intensive energy. It introduces Genesis, a solar-powered, modular rooftop data centre that enables repurposing older-generation servers with no cooling energy, and evaluates its energy, carbon, and cost performance against conventional renewal strategies. Through an analytical framework and scenario analyses, Genesis generally improves carbon efficiency and total cost while maintaining or increasing compute capacity, illustrating a viable path to lower-impact, scalable mini data centres. The work highlights potential e-waste reduction and emissions savings, while outlining practical extensions to model realism such as diverse workloads and variable solar conditions.
Abstract
Mini data centres have become increasingly prevalent in diverse organizations in recent years. They can be easily deployed at large scale, with high resilience. They are also cost-effective and provide highsecurity protection. On the other hand, IT technologies have resulted in the development of ever more energy-efficient servers, leading to the periodic replacement of older-generation servers in mini data centres. However, the disposal of older servers has resulted in electronic waste that further aggravates the already critical e-waste problem. Furthermore, despite the shift towards more energy-efficient servers, many mini data centres still rely heavily on high-carbon energy sources. This contributes to data centres' overall carbon footprint. All these issues are concerns for sustainability. In order to address this sustainability issue, this paper proposes an approach to extend the lifespan of older-generation servers in mini data centres. This is made possible thanks to a novel solar-powered computing technology, named Genesis, that compensates for the energy overhead generated by older servers. As a result, electronic waste can be reduced while improving system sustainability by reusing functional server hardware. Moreover, Genesis does not require server cooling, which reduces energy and water requirements. Analytical reasoning is applied to compare the efficiency of typical conventional mini data centre designs against alternative Genesis-based designs, in terms of energy, carbon emissions and exploitation costs.