Hardware lifecycle: The Acid Test for Green Data Centers - By Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jan 5 2011) Servers

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   If you're serious about greening your data center, you can answer two simple questions: Where does your old server and IT hardware go when you get rid of it? Are you sure it is being disposed in a green fashion?

   Sooner or later -- probably later, by my estimation -- hardware manufacturers will start putting "carbon manufacturing" (CM) estimates on their marketing literature.  Simply put, if you buy a server, you should be able to look and see how many pounds of carbon was put into the atmosphere to 1) Build it and 2) ship it to the country of use.  Bonus points for 3) Estimated amount of carbon/energy/resources it will take for end-of-life disposal.

   Do I expect anyone to make drastic purchasing changes based on the CM numbers for a particular server? Not really, but it is a nice next starting point for the engineering and marketing people to try to produce a justifiable number for both lower energy usage in manufacturing and lower carbon usage.

   A CM number in combination with energy consumption should also help in deciding the final fate of your server somewhere in its lifecycle.    If it costs X-number of pounds of carbon to build a server that uses Y-number of pounds of carbon per year of operation, at what point are you better off unplugging and scrapping said server for a shiny new one that took A-number of pounds of carbon to build and will use B-number of points of carbon per year of operation.

   The reason why I bring this up rolls back to the questions at the beginning of this column.  When you buy new servers, some manufacturers are more than happy to give you a trade-in credit for your old gear or you can simply sell the gear to a third-party for resale and parts. 

   In either case, the hardware moves out of your hands and could end up anywhere from being purchased on the cheap -- and plugged in for another 10 years, merrily burning Y-number of pounds of carbon per year -- to being shipped off to some developing nation as scrap metal and dumped in an unregulated landfill that ends up poisoning the surrounding environment -- ultimately discovered by CNN or "60 Minutes" in a special prime-time feature.

   (Please note, this should not the primary motivation for stripping off <Your company name here> inventory stickers off of all gear before shipping).

   See where question #2 above comes into play?  Regardless of how old server and IT hardware is leaving your company, you should at least try to make the effort to find out if it is being safely disposed once it hits end of life.  I realize many companies can't 100 percent guarantee that every last circuit board will end up being treated like the toxic waste/recycling opportunity it is, but asking the question often enough will help more servers and boards get disposed properly.

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