For companies that need new high-performance, cutting-edge hardware and strive to reduce their environmental footprint, Supermicro’s rack-scale Total IT green computing technologies could be the answer
Heading into 2023, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives remain atop corporate agendas, affecting operations across organizations, and driving the need to find more energy efficient, carbon neutral IT technologies to support success. Supermicro believes it can be a part of the solution and provide a win-win for both business and the planet.
According to a 2022 Capgemini report, IT accounts for about 3% of global CO2 emissions—businesses need to consider more environmentally friendly, sustainable IT approaches to help deliver on carbon reduction commitments while continuing to improve product performance for their customers.
For Charles Liang, founder, president and CEO of Supermicro, sustainable IT is a simple solution to the disconnect between increasing power demands across all sectors and the critical nature of the climate crisis. What’s more, says Liang, “green computing can be free.”
According to deep calculations and validation made by Liang and Supermicro, and confirmed by engineers and other experts, “Organizations using green computing solutions could save a combined $10 billion in electricity costs per year. What’s more, the reduction of electricity use from green computing solutions like Supermicro’s is equivalent to removing 30 fossil fuel power plants and that also equivalent to planting approximately 8 billion trees to offset the CO2 emissions,” says Liang. Thus, Supermicro’s green computing clients can save money while helping to save the planet.
Green computing and more energy efficient IT hardware have a twofold reduction effect—first on the total cost of ownership (TCO) burden on organizations by reducing operating expenses and second on a business’s carbon footprint.
A History of Sustainability
Supermicro started to focus on the environmental impact of servers and data centers since 2004, when it first introduced energy-efficient power supplies. Its solutions are deployed worldwide in a myriad of sectors including social media, autonomous driving training systems, clouds, telco, IoT and enterprises. Many institutions use Supermicro servers for advanced biosciences, physics, AI, and climate change research. Supermicro is confident in claims that its servers featuring the latest generation of CPUs and GPUs from partners like Intel® are the “ideal choice for most workloads”, claims backed up by industry-leading performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar benchmarks.
Today, as a fast-growing global provider of high-performance server, storage, AI platform, and Total IT solutions, Supermicro’s commitment to energy efficiency and protecting the environment is unwavering. Its server building block solutions, resource-saving architecture, and replaceable subsystems that sustain hardware longevity prevent entire servers from getting scrapped (disaggregated servers). Customers can leverage new technologies immediately without concern about contributing enormous amounts of e-waste while reducing their capital expenditure, or CAPEX investment.
In its business practices, Supermicro is also heavily investing in environmentally friendly and sustainable systems. Supermicro has solar-powered campuses and is actively engaged with purchasing renewable energy credits (RECs) for carbon-free wind energy. The company is a member of the Green Grid Consortium and chair of the Liquid Cooling Group. Supermicro focuses on the Consortium’s sustainability metric -- Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) -- in its global manufacturing operations and product design to reduce carbon emissions from data centers. In addition, Supermicro adheres to responsible mineral sourcing and leverages an Environmental Management System (EMS).
However, despite the evident benefits, there are logistical and operational hurdles to jumping on the green computing train for many organizations and their IT teams. Liang says he “feels our customers’ hesitation” when it comes to the perceived difficulties in implementing green computing solutions, such as months-long lead times for installation or reliability concerns. Liang is committed to changing that perception with Supermicro’s investments and technologies.
The challenge is most apparent with data center cooling systems, especially with liquid cooling. As of Q1 2023, however, Liang has pledged that Supermicro will reduce the lead time for liquid cooling system installation from two months to two weeks. He says the systems will also be more reliable and easier to deploy and maintain. Liquid cooling can reduce PUE from 1.5 to 1.05, dramatically lowering electricity consumption in a data center by reducing the CRAC unit load and lowering the electricity consumed at the server level, which in turn can also decrease system fan speeds for additional energy savings.
Building a Sustainable Future with Green Total IT Solutions
The business world of 2022 and beyond is ESG-centric. IT decisions are now based largely on a vendor’s ability to help move customers forward to achieve their environmental sustainability goals. Increasing performance while using less electricity and reducing the amount of e-waste created are key selection criteria for server providers. Supermicro’s rack-scale Total IT Solutions allow businesses to practice green computing with a one-stop-shop experience. Green computing and operational efficiency are complementary, as reducing the cost of energy leads to a more efficient and cost-effective data center.
For Charles Liang, though, there is one bigger goal: ensuring that the world’s finite resources are preserved and making “our only planet greener and more beautiful.” This vision is, he says, the main driver behind everything he has been doing so dedicatedly and passionately since 2004, and it will continue to drive the company’s state-of-the-art green computing solutions. It just so happens that this will also propell Supermicro’s customers to higher levels of business performance.