Sustainable Computing: Challenges and Opportunities for Enterprises

This article is sponsored by Intel?

Intel? just launched its 4th Generation Xeon? Scalable processor, which is geared towards its Enterprise customer base. To learn more about how Intel solves sustainability challenges, I had a conversation with Stephanie Schmidt, Senior Director, Data Center Product Sustainability with Intel.

The key takeaways of the conversation are as follows:

· Sustainability is a key issue: With the increasing demand for computing, data center energy consumption, waste, and water use is also growing, making sustainability a critical consideration for enterprises. Inefficient infrastructure can emit increasing amounts of carbon, especially as compute demand increases, creating a big challenge for enterprises.

· Sustainability can drive business growth: Sustainability can be a differentiator for businesses and lead to new monetization opportunities. It reduces costs, drives value, and is a huge driver for innovation, making it a selling point for sustainable products and solutions.

· Energy efficiency is driving tech innovation: Sustainability is driving tech innovation and new solutions. For example, AI-based telemetry and immersion cooling can reduce electricity consumption, and modularity can reduce carbon footprint. Intel offers software that autonomously and continuously optimizes applications in the cloud, reducing CPU utilization while still meeting performance and latency goals.

Avrohom: One of the topics on everyone’s minds is sustainability. As you know, there are many public initiatives focused on it. We have the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, as well as many individual government initiatives that are focused on the health of our planet. With that on our minds, what are some of the challenges enterprises face when considering options for refreshing their aging infrastructure?

Stephanie: We’re at an inflection point, with three things coming to a head. One, we’re hitting a new era of digital transformation, where a shared virtual environment, cloud to edge, is driving really unprecedented demands on compute, on the underlying infrastructure. Secondly, as compute demand grows, so does data center energy consumption, waste, and water use. So, sustainability is a key issue. Not just a corporate consideration but a global priority. And thirdly, energy efficiency, as everyone knows, is a focal point. And as we remain in the era of carbon-based energy powering our digital world, inefficient infrastructure can really emit increasing amounts of carbon, especially as compute demand increases.

So, this is the big challenge. And specifically, some of the key challenges our enterprises face when considering options for refreshing their aging infrastructure or just increasing their capacity during this transformation of computing are things like congested data flows, rapidly expanding hybrid cloud environments, incompatible security techniques and software, application programming interfaces, APIs, dynamic shifts in workload performance, memory, and storage needs. This could drive stranded overtaxed, and inefficient use of data center resources. And then also sustainability mandates, carbon reduction focus and energy efficiency, and next-gen data centers are really aimed at addressing these challenges at scale.

Avrohom: It’s really fascinating when you talk about the infrastructure that businesses are using and the refreshing of the aging infrastructure. If you think about it, this is something that affects each and every person. When we pick up our phones, we call into call centers; when we go online and on websites, we think it’s just somewhere out there. But as you know, there are computers and servers that are sitting somewhere in a data closet taking up energy, and this energy is being generated by fossil fuels or coal or whatever, and hopefully moving towards green energy, which is another topic in and of itself. This is something that’s not a big corporate problem or government problem; this is something that actually affects each and every one of us.

Stephanie: Very true. We can all have an impact, a positive impact on this.

Avrohom: What are some of the ways businesses go about attaining their sustainability goals while still keeping the CFO happy? Because, at the end of the day, it’s the economics that will drive the growth of their business.

Stephanie: This is exactly the point; sustainability fuels the business. It reduces cost, drives value, is a huge driver for innovation, and can lead to new monetization opportunities. And when I think about it, I think of three things. First, if we look even within ourselves, at our own operations and our own data centers, its sustainability is driving us to make them more efficient, use less, and spend less.

Secondly, we really see it as a differentiator for our business. As you mentioned, we all have a role to play, and the market is selective and willing to pay more for sustainable products and solutions. And the fact that our chips are produced with 90 to 100% renewable electricity now with a goal to be 100% in 2030, we really see this as an advantage and as a selling point, and as a differentiator.

And then thirdly, and probably what is most exciting about sustainability, is it’s driving tech innovation and new solutions. I’ll walk through a couple of examples.

At a workload level, Intel offers software from Granulate that autonomously and continuously optimizes applications in the cloud, and it can reduce CPU utilization and, therefore, the underlying electricity usage while still meeting performance and latency goals. We’ve seen an average cost savings of 40%, 38% processing reduction times, with a 5% throughput increase. So, these are great results, and this is a business stream for us.

Another example is AI-based telemetry, and it’s driving a lot of great innovation. And with KDDI, a telecommunication operator in Japan, we were able to reduce, with AI-based telemetry electricity consumption, by 20%, using our Xeon scalable processors with their power management and AI capabilities.

Another example where energy efficiency is driving new products is in the area of immersion cooling, and this can drive rack-level power usage effectiveness down from 1.3 to 1, a 30% improvement.

Another example. Modularity and extending platform life is another area where we can reduce carbon footprint. And it makes great business sense. For example, the data center modular hardware system is a reusable platform. And it really changes how we’re designing data centers. The modularity allows us to reduce our validation costs, but it’s also a smaller motherboard, so there’s less carbon. It also gives our customers the ability to refresh certain components while reusing others. So, it’s a win-win on all fronts. And second life systems also helps us reduce, reuse and recycle. So, there’s significant opportunity in sustainability, because what’s good for the planet is also good for the business. It opens up so many opportunities to go and do something wonderful.

Avrohom: I love what I’m hearing! Instead of looking at it as a cost, it’s actually a benefit because it’s going to be lowering power consumption and it’s going to be lowering energy costs. I liked the part about refreshing components of the equipment because, in the past, you had to do a forklift. You had to remove the old server and completely replace it, which can be very disruptive. Besides completely replacing the actual hardware, you need to install a new OS, you need to install servers, put it on the network, and address security needs. There’s a whole bunch of things that have to happen, in addition to just refreshing equipment. So, I really like the fact that you can mix and match and refresh components as you go along.

Stephanie: Yes, just so much opportunity in this space. Exactly.

Avrohom: Can you share some case studies about how the fourth-generation Intel Xeon scalable processor addresses sustainability?

Stephanie: We’ve launched this fourth-gen Xeon scalable processor. It’s our most sustainable data processor ever. It’s got a ton of built-in accelerators. I’ll just share some quick data points before getting into the case studies.

We’re seeing with our advanced matrix extensions, AMX, up to a 14x per-watt improvement. We’ve also added a new feature called optimized power mode within our fourth-gen Xeon scalable processor, and it can drive up to 20% CPU power savings with little performance impact in a range of utilizations where our customers are running. So, that’s really exciting. But I know you want to hear about some case studies. We’ve started shipping, and you’ve seen some great success with customers implementing fourth-gen Xeon scalable. An example could be Alibaba on a microservices workload. They saw an 80% performance boost with a 40% better performance per watt as they moved to fourth-gen. Also, for database applications, customers using SAP HANA were able to reduce their power consumption by 38% with a constant query rate. We’ve also seen new solutions for energy efficiency, edge to cloud. For example, Deutsche Telekom in their 5g base station, with fourth-gen Xeon Scalable. With its VRAM boosts, they were able to increase by 2x their VRAM capacity within the same power envelope. They leveraged the built-in telemetry in the processor and power controls to manage the traffic on the network, which drove a lot of those efficiencies.

There’s some great software value there as well. A software example would be telemetry aware, scheduling, and Kubernetes. And it can achieve power-driven scheduling and tuning based on CPU telemetry and workload scaling. And we’ve seen Kubernetes power manager coupled with enhanced speed select technologies within our processor, resulting in the ability to set power profiles according to the workload. Overall, our internal estimates have shown that we can drive 30% efficiencies for carbon, through software and app designs. So, these are just some examples and some really exciting first data that we’ve got.

Avrohom: It definitely does sound exciting. Especially if the big players and industry leaders are using it, and it’s helping them drive efficiencies, then certainly, for enterprises, it can really do a lot.

Stephanie, how can people connect with you to learn more about the fourth-generation Xeon scalable processor?

Stephanie: To learn more about the fourth-gen Xeon scalable processor, you can visit our?website. We’ve got a press kit that’s published, and the site includes back sheets, news, videos, demos, and partner news as well.

To connect with me personally, I’m always available on our social media channels, such as?LinkedIn?and Twitter. Feel free to connect, and I’m happy to address any questions. And, of course, we’ve got our Intel channels, that are open for participation as well.

Avrohom: Stephanie, do you have any parting words of wisdom that you’d like to share with the audience?

Stephanie: As we think about the future and the future of the data center, three things come to mind. Heterogeneous architecture and silicon that’s optimized for the workload to maximize performance per watt. Secondly, as things become more disaggregated, optimizing the system level is critical, cloud to edge, for things like security, AI, and sustainability. And thirdly, sustainability and how to increase data center capacity within an existing power footprint are critical. And so, this is going to drive a lot of disruptive solutions, and it’s going to force us to think differently. Solutions, like new carbon-aware platforms, AI solutions for carbon optimizations, and really transforming the way we design and think about the data center, our factories, and even the grid. So, doing more with fewer resources is key. It’s an exciting time, and it’s about all of us. So, let’s lead this together, and what’s good for the planet is also good for the business.

Learn more about the Intel??4th Generation Xeon? Scalable processor:

About the Author

Avrohom Gottheil is the founder of #AskTheCEO Media, where he helps global brands get heard over the noise on social media by presenting their corporate message using language people understand.

Avrohom presents his clients as Thought Leaders, which challenges his audience to reimagine their own mission and vision, delivering actionable insights, and leaving them passionate, motivated, and with the necessary tools to take immediate action.

Avrohom comes from a 20+ year career in IT and Telecom, where he helped businesses around the world install and maintain their communication systems and contact centers. He is a Top-ranked global expert in IoT, AI, Cloud, and Cybersecurity, followed worldwide on Twitter, and a frequent speaker on leveraging technology to accelerate revenue growth.

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