The Climate Crisis and the Data Center: Going Beyond Zero Emissions 

Sponsored Content by Lenovo

With stark reminders of the climate crisis, we’ve witnessed over the last few years, there is a rapidly growing call to drive a more environmentally friendly and sustainable path forward.  IT is not, and should not be, immune to that call.  Consider the following:

• A typical data center consumes 50X more power per square foot than a typical building
• Data Centers consume approximately 2% of all energy in the United States
• Data Center energy consumption is growing 12% annually

Given our society’s never-ending demand for more IT, the trend toward more power growth will continue.  Knowing that electricity generation is the top contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, it is our responsibility to innovate in ways that enable us to reduce the amount of power it takes to run our systems, resulting in reduced carbon footprint of IT around the world.  By taking these steps today we can begin to pave a path to a more sustainable future for generations to come.

Lenovo has taken this challenge to heart, reducing our carbon emissions by 92% in the last decade.  We have been named to the EPA’s Top30 Tech & Telecom Green Power Partner list for operating power initiatives across our facilities. Additionally, we attained LEED Gold certification for the use of innovations like low energy lighting with motion detectors in our offices.  And our manufacturing facility in Whitsett, NC is literally covered in solar panels to generate renewable energy.

Our commitment to sustainability isn’t limited to facilities operations. Lenovo ThinkSystem products are designed to be the most efficient servers in the industry, with 16 of the top 18 SPECPower benchmark scores.  Our Neptune™ liquid cooling has expanded to include accelerators, power supplies and liquid-to-air exchangers within air-cooled systems.  We also offer software platforms like Energy Aware Runtime (EAR) to manage power consumption at a chassis level.

Today, we’d like to challenge the status quo to focus on how the industry must reimagine the future of the data center in a more sustainable environment.  We must continue to push the boundaries of availability, flexibility, performance and sustainability.

Together, with our customers, we will drive new approaches that:

• Deliver greater performance while consuming less power
• Pave a path to affordably move to low emission power sources
• Deliver true innovation to recycle the waste heat/energy from our systems

To learn more about these, and other Lenovo initiatives designed to reduce the environmental impact of IT, please join us September 8th at Lenovo TechWorld ‘21, for a session on Zero Emissions Computing, hosted by Scott Tease, Vice President and General Manager of HPC & AI for Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, with special guest John Goodhue, Executive Director, Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC).  You can register here for TechWorld ‘21.  We look forward to seeing you there!