In The Arena by TechArena - Sustainability Advancements from OCP in 2023 with Intel, Microsoft and Schneider Electric

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

TechArena host Allyson Klein talks to Intel’s Eric Dahlen, Microsoft’s Shurti Sethi and Schneider Electric’s Alex Rakow about the advancement of OCP’s sustainability initiative in 2023 across embodied carbon in silicon, circularity, and getting beyond PUE.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Allison Klein. Now let's step into the arena. Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name is Alison Klein, and I'm so delighted to have more members of the OCP Sustainability Initiative with me today. I'm going to introduce them. Let's start with Alex Rakow from Schneider Electric. Welcome to the program, Alex. Thanks so much for having me. And we've got Shruti Sethi from Microsoft. Welcome.

Thanks, Alison. I'm glad to be here and speaking to you. And finally, Eric Dalen from Intel. Welcome to the program, Eric. How are you doing? Good. Thanks, Alison. So the Sustainability Initiative obviously was founded as a pillar of OCP last year, and we are a year in advance and have been doing a series of interviews on sustainability and what the Open Compute Project is focused on. You are all from different spots within the data center value chain. And I wanted to just start with what is the value of companies from such diverse focus points in the industry working together under the umbrella of

OCP? A very simple answer, I think, and both Eric and Alex can add on to it. I think one major reason, and that's probably not just for sustainability, but it's for every different aspect that we work on in OCP. Having different members of the value chain certainly provides the different point of views that are needed in order to verify whether the standards and specifications that are getting formed or the guidelines getting formed are actually practical and conducive to all sides, like all the parties that are involved. So I would think that is like the biggest advantage. And additionally, unless we have representation from all the different sides in the value chain, it doesn't make sense to set any kind of guidelines or standards, right? Because the possibility of

it being followed is only when, you know, folks who are going to follow it or who need to follow it are in agreement, which you know only when you have representation from them. Alex and Eric, anything else to add? I agree with Shruti. Putting on my day job hat at Schneider Electric as a vendor to the data center industry, one of the great values for us of engaging with OCP is the fact that it is founded on openness. And it's a forum for us to learn from each other and collaborate with each other in a way that moves the industry forward that wouldn't be possible with us just acting independently and interacting in the way that we normally do outside of the OCP organization. The only thing I would

add is that I think what we're after here is at a solution level, something that feels like it's vertically integrated. We want to take advantage of all the degrees of freedom to change the way the hardware operates and how it's implemented, change the way that the systems built on that hardware are implemented and define new standards that they adhere to so the capabilities are now universal if you're compliant with these specifications in OCP.

And that makes it possible for software and the people who are operating this to count on a behavior and a set of capabilities. It gives you what you would get if you were vertical and you built the whole thing yourself, you could make it work the way you want it to work. What you see here, Schneider's a supplier, Intel's a component supplier,

and to some degree, a system architecture and vendor. And then Microsoft and others are customers that are operating these big hyperscale data centers built on this infrastructure. If we don't have this kind of cooperative effort to define how we want it to work and why we want it to work that way and what it takes to get it to do what you want it to do, we aren't going to be able to build this whole solution that appears purpose-built and actually behaves do what you want it to do. We aren't going to be able to build this whole solution, a fierce purpose built and actually behaves the way you want it to behave.

That makes a lot of sense. Today's topic is sustainability breakthroughs in 2022 and 2023, really the period since the sustainability initiative was announced to the industry. We've previously discussed the three sustainability BHAGs, or Big Hairy Audacious Goals, established by the industry. We've previously discussed the three sustainability BHAGs or Big Hairy Audacious Goals established by the initiative. Let's start by placing context for the team's focus this year. So when we were working on establishing sustainability as the fifth tenet for OCP in preparation for the summit last year, we were thinking about how we define sustainability for OCP in a way that's going to be meaningful in the incubation process and meaningful as we evaluate new submissions to OCP. And we landed on three criteria that sustainability advancements among those submitting new ideas to OCP ought to be meaningful, two, relevant, and three, data-driven.

So by meaningful, they ought to make a meaningful impact on sustainability, that they need to move the ball forward in some way that makes sense. Relevant, whatever sustainability attribute is being claimed by somebody submitting an idea to OCP ought to be relevant to whatever the technology is. So if it has nothing really to do with storage and you're submitting a new storage technology, then that really doesn't move the ball forward, as I was saying. And then finally, data-driven. So we need metrics that are meaningful to whatever sustainability attribute is being brought forward and being claimed, and metrics that are going to be meaningful outside of OCP as well to the stakeholders that matter. So that's the context that we have for those BHAGs. And that's kind of a North Star for us as we've sought to

manage our activities in the sustainability project over the past year. I'm glad that you brought up metrics. This was an area that I wanted to talk to you about. Within that transparency reporting and metrics focus, what has the group been working on in 2023 of note? And can you give us some highlights from the summit? A lot of the concentration on metrics right now is like sustainability is, I'll say, a newer domain for all the data centers and data center working. So one major, I'll say, like hurdle that we collectively need to get past is being able

to measure what we want to improve. And that's where this third focus that Alex mentioned about setting the standardized metrics across the board is coming into picture. A lot of the concentration right now has been on some metrics that existed like PUE, but also on metrics like CUE, WUE, and GWP that are new and upcoming and more getting defined and refined right now. And with these, one of the focus items with working with these metrics or setting the metrics is to make sure that information does not knowingly or unknowingly get misrepresented in these because sometimes you measure items and create the metrics

but without knowing the context when the measurement happened, the metric might actually reflect a very different scenario. So one major focus right now with setting the metrics and refining them has been to make sure that the context of measurement is clearly displayed so that it is an apples to apples comparison. Like in future, once these are standardized and these metric values can be exchanged across the value chain, they can actually be used for a comparison or to be able to understand one functionality versus the other in terms of its sustainability impact. new metrics, right? I think first, like Trudy said, we all have thrown around in the industry the term PUE, and sometimes it means PUE as in the ISO standard, and sometimes it means a partial PUE, a PPUE, and that's part of the problem, right? We are talking about how it was measured, where it was measured, under what circumstances it was measured. So we'd like to go ahead and clean that up, right? So that's one focus of the metrics

is to make sure that we, you know, focus on say like ISO category one, output of the EPS, PUE for the whole data center as a trailing six month average or 12 month average, not some theoretical number that was measured once or in theory could be measured, but we've never seen it, right? So when we get a number for a data center, it's a live number. And like Shruti said, then you have apples to apples and you can tell if you're gaining or losing over time and how you

compare to other data centers that are of a similar scale and a similar environmental set of circumstances. So there's that. And then we've been focused, and we talked about this at the last summit, and we will talk about it again at this summit. There are many things that we are not yet measuring. We can talk about WUE rates, how much water you use per kilowatt of energy, or global warming potential, the whole convert everything into kilograms of CO2 equivalents, that kind of thing, right? So we can standardize on those metrics, but from an efficiency perspective, which is really

particularly our contributions to these work streams, the P we assume is right that if you take the ratio of the IT energy to the total data center energy, anything outside of IT equipment is some kind of overhead and should be minimized. We'll all agree to that, right? You want to keep the overhead down as much as you can, but it also assumes that all the IT power is good power. That's not really true, right? So we'd like to get some metrics in there

so that we can tell how many of the watts that you feed into the IT equipment are generating useful work versus doing something else, getting lost in conversions from AC to DC at DC to DC or running fans instead of running equipment that's generating a useful workload capacity, producing results. How much of it is persistent power irrespective of load versus power that scales with load, right? So that's really where the focus is right now on the efficiency side. That's great. And I was familiar with PUE and CUE when you

guys were talking. The Water Utilization Efficiency Index is interesting to me. And can you explain a little bit more on GWP in terms of exactly what it's doing? Or is that what you just explained, Eric? As we talk about a circular economy and reduce, reuse, recycle, all that fun stuff, you know, we want to account for the total footprint. And like Alex said, one of the pieces of progress, you know, we talk about starting to sprint and make progress here. We approved a white paper that explains kind of the scope, charter and goals of the sustainability initiative. And that's up on the website now. And we want to make sure that we're accounting for all of the materials that go into the data center and into the manufacturing of the devices

that go into the data center that we have basically the whole embodied footprint accounted for. And that's really what GWP is about. There's a protocol that assesses the global warming potential of other things besides just carbon intensity of energy dissipated. So there's more to it than that. That's a good question that you raise, Allison.

Global warming potential is sort of the constant way that we can measure a material's or a process's effect on global warming that isn't tied to carbon. So we use carbon equivalents sometimes, but global warming potential is a nice standard way to do that. And it's useful because it is comprehensible and understood outside of our industry. And that's something that we need to also keep our eye on as we develop these advanced metrics. So Eric just explained very well how PUE has gotten us so far, but has limitations and how we're using these more advanced metrics to continue the journey that PUE started for us. PUE has affected a lot of change for our industry, but we have not gotten all the way to where we need to be. Carbon use effectiveness, water use intensity, these things are going to help us to move that additional distance.

However, all of them are probably a little bit over the head of the general public. We need to think about how we help to demonstrate not only to each other within OCP, within the industry, but to our customers, to our investors, to regulators, that we are taking significant action on sustainability. We're putting a lot of thought and work and investment into this inside OCP, and we need to make sure that we're able to demonstrate that in meaningful ways to stakeholders outside the organization. So just to add a very simple example to understand GWP,

if we sort of see that there is one kg of carbon dioxide that is released during some process, and that one kg of carbon dioxide has certain heat retaining capacity in the atmosphere. Now, another process or the same process also releases a different carbon based gas. For example, methane. And now methane has maybe 25 times the heat retaining capacity compared to the same amount of carbon dioxide. Then I will sort of say that methane has 25 as the GWP measurement value.

So that's how GWP helps us standardize and look at the impact of all the different carbon emission gases and materials on one particular foundation, which is carbon dioxide's heat retaining. We're entering a realm where everybody's heard of generative AI and probably has seen the hype cycle that we're in for large language models and the extremely power intensive hardware that it takes to train those models. Those devices are commonly already pushing the envelope on how much power you can cram into a device to convert to performance. And so they need to be liquid cool.

And the liquids that we use are a point of controversy because different liquids with different thermal conductivities, as it turns out, right, the ones that are cheapest to make and most lowest energy to circulate are also the ones that have the highest global warming potential and are facing, you know, potentially being banned in the EU, right? So we need this context to kind of balance out, you know, across all the metrics, not just, you know, efficiency and capability from an engineering perspective, but across the whole sustainability front, what is the best solution? That makes a lot of sense. You all have talked about the concept circularity and, you know, people talk about that as reduce, reuse, recycle, or, you know, there's different ways to approach that topic. How has the sustainability initiative tackled circularity?

And are there any key achievements from the last year that you'd like to highlight? So circularity was identified in the white paper that Eric mentioned. So we produced this white paper to articulate what is the OCP perspective on sustainability to make sure that sustainability, a word that's used in almost every sentence in every conference for the data center industry, that we have a clearly articulated perspective from OCP that helps guide us as we are evaluating which projects make it into OCP and how we're directing our own activities. And two of the pillars that we identified in that white paper

are efficiency, no surprise there from an OCP standpoint. And the second is circularity. And some work that we had done in parallel is the Design for Circularity Guide that we published out of the Sustainability Group, also in the lead up to the summit last year. And that's designed to be a sort of menu for a hardware solution developer as they try to figure out how do I work sustainability into the design of my product. The criteria there that are specific and metric related to product use. So how do you design a product for extended useful life, better serviceability, materials? How do you design a product for extended useful life, better serviceability? Materials. How do you ensure that it has reduced toxicity, which of course helps with the recycling process? How do you ensure that the piece of equipment itself is recyclable, that there are materials

that are recoverable from it? We included packaging to make sure the packaging is minimal and recyclable. And then finally, how are you designing in better reusability? So that means repairability, refurbishability, if that's a word, and to add even more syllables, remanufacturability. So how do you ensure that a product can be remanufactured if that's relevant? And we include specific criteria for all of those. So it's worked into the kind of DNA for sustainability at OCP through that articulation in that white paper.

And then the design for circularity guide is a high value piece of guidance that really any vendor to the data center industry, any data center operator can use to evaluate the potential circularity at the design stage of a solution. Very nice. And from a standpoint of key accomplishments or progress in terms of our thinking about that, where are we as an industry, do you think, on some of those main tenets? I know that the history of the industry has not been necessarily focused in circularity. Where do you see progress and what would you like to see from the industry more? Certainly there is an endeavor to reuse the components, you know, whether we are looking at some of the processor side components or storage media side components, there is certainly a big push going on in order to reuse the components.

One tricky part when you're trying to reuse these components as circularity is that they still have to satisfy the key metrics. So imagine that as you are moving in time, there are newer generations of those same components coming in. And expectation is that newer generation is more performant, might be more efficient. So you have to correctly evaluate that if I'm reusing a previous component, am I actually burning maybe more power on that than using a newer component? So it's a sum total that you sort of have to look into

when you're deciding these circularity things. And especially on storage devices, I think one other pretty aspect is security of all the data that is stored. So there is another push or work that is going on towards sanitization, especially for storage devices. So when you need to reuse the devices, you want to make sure that the previous data is cleanly wiped and there is no way to reach that data again. So that is another aspect that needs more work and more, I'll say, standardization and rules and guidance. It's also worth mentioning that OCP is built with interoperability as one of our core

concerns. And the more interoperable equipment is, the more circular it is, because the more it can be shared, the more it can be repurposed from one setting to another. We've talked about metrics and we've talked about circularity, but you've also published a lot on embodied carbon. Can you talk a little bit about what the organization is focused on there and what progress has been made? Yes, absolutely. If you actually look at the sum total of carbon emissions, embodied carbon also occupies a good chunk and needs concentration.

And one of the attempts that one OCP sustainability work stream is making right now is to try to standardize the format for exchanging information about embodied carbon. Now, embodied carbon is mainly contributed right when the components are getting manufactured. So during that time, a large part of the embodied carbon emission already occurs. And suppliers or different value chain members have a better idea of what that embodied carbon can be. And we do need a standard way of being able to exchange and understand this information also, along with the power information. So there is one work stream that's working on building a format of exchange of this embodied carbon information.

There's also some progress on kind of piloting this. So we're trying to come, like I say, all the way to an integrated solution level here. We're trying to standardize the format of the data exchange so that someone who's trying to do, you know, scope three, supply chain and process, what is embodied in the part by the time it is sold, because no one else has that information. So you really want a way for whoever's in possession of that information to make it available to whoever's downstream in receipt of the device, trying to track that as part of the total footprint of what they're doing. And then our, my company Intel is also trying, we're working towards a pilot where we will support an interface through which you can query and get data

in that format on our devices. We're not there yet, but we're working on that. And then we're trying to build software tools that use that interface so that you can get, in theory, then a full inventory with this information across all the components in the inventory. This is something that can't be done today. And like we discussed before,

it won't ever be able to stop it if we don't establish and motivate adherence to standards that make it possible to do. You can think of, so kind of the vision here is we're trying to work towards a future where if you're OCP compliant, you have the ability to do this with your hardware inventory

and actually get the embodied footprint information that you need directly from the supplier. Find out what device you're using and get the information associated with that device. And then do the same thing with energy. Get the actual energy and then the intensity associated with that energy. If you put those things together, you can do a total footprint. You can do autonomous optimization of your footprint. That's the vision, is to enable a consumer of infrastructure to be able to measure and then try, run here, run there, run at this time, run at that time on different types of infrastructure and optimize your own footprint. That would be a transformative

future from where we are today. One thing to add to what Eric just said, we are also actively coordinating with other organizations working on this topic of embodied carbon. So the iMasons organization is working on this in the context of the data center industry. They're very much focused on establishing some guidance for equipment providers, power providers, and material providers that go into building and powering a data center. OCP has been more focused this year on the carbon modeling for difficult to model equipment, mostly silicon equipment. In that way, we're making sure that our activities are being additive to one another, that we're working with them and not creating a Venn diagram where there's too much overlap there

and can hopefully, as Eric was describing, land in a place where we have standards that actually allow us to use this data for practical purposes like design and procurement. So it's been a fantastic conversation, and I'm sure that folks who are listening online are really interested in getting involved with the sustainability initiative, learning more about how they can use the publications within their own data center design and planning, or if they're a member of the industry, ensuring that they're aligned with where customers want to go in terms of core capabilities, where would you send them to find out more and to engage with your team? Well, first of all, please join us at the OCP Summit

and come to the sustainability track. There's going to be lots of great discussions on many of the topics that we discussed in the podcast today. And then if you are or aren't able to join us at the summit, you could always join us on a monthly basis at our monthly meetings for the sustainability project for OCP. And these are terrific meetings because they're not just focused on what are our ongoing projects, giving each other updates and making sure we're collaborating,

but we invite a speaker every month to come and deliver a new topic to us, something to stimulate our thinking, something to expand the scope of how we think about activating sustainability in the data center industry and within OCP. So there's a lot of learning that goes on there and it's a great community and all are welcome. And to find out how to join, just go to the OCP website and navigate the sustainability project. Well, thanks so much for all of you for being here today.

It's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having us, Alison. Thanks for joining The Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by The Tech Arena.