A presentation at Linux Foundation Member Summit in in San Francisco, CA, USA by erik riedel
SUSTAINABILITY ALL THE WAY DOWN SRI RAMKRISHNA PRINCIPAL ECOSYSTEMS ENGINEER | ITRENEW ERIK RIEDEL SENIOR VP, ENGINEERING | ITRENEW
Sustainability Implications Demand Comprehensive Approaches Renewable progress is great, and necessary, but INSUFFICIENT
natural resources carbon footprint demand growth
clouds drive demand https://greensoftware.foundation/ inefficient toolchains software footprint
Sustainability, ESG, …, OSPO Pursuing sustainable software can be a partnership between a corporate sustainability program and an OSPO => like other cross-silo corporate projects Perhaps controversial to say that software sustainability belongs in an OSPO – cross-department, company-wide – and we should have that debate The role of OSPOs and Sofware Sustainability is a topic for a future talk! Happy to entertain questions at the end
Open Is Necessary, But Not Sufficient Per Se design, engineering and product expertise, rigorous commitment to component quality [hardware] design, engineering and product expertise, rigorous commitment to component quality from capacitors to CAP theorem to cognitive load wide dynamic range of skills must be applied & appreciated ORCHESTRATING AN OPEN HARDWARE + OPEN SOFTWARE STACK [software] requires baseline partnership across hardware & software devops – collaboration from designers & developers to operations automation, analytics, and machine learning for all the things I8
OPEN HARDWARE, OPEN SPECIFICATIONS • instead of every company making their own unique specifications • we work together on common elements to think about • specifications that maximize cooling and reduce heat • high density servers for maximum computation per floor tile • form factors that can use any space in any location – under desks, in closets of various sizes, outdoors – to drive edge computing • design for use of off-the-shelf components that are already efficient in mass production • re-use, re-purpose, revamp the Hardware Supply Chain
Sesame by ITRenew integrated rack-scale solutions Dual top-ofrack sw itches, netw ork fabric M ini-rack edge solutions TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS Flash-based storage nodes; M illions of IOPS & terabytes of capacity FLEXIBLE SCALE & CAPACITY Engineered, tested, supported as a single stack 6 to 96 nodes per rack >1,000 nodes per cluster 25/100G networking Roll it in, turn it on Com pute and storage nodes Single or dual socket nodes, 25 GbE connectivity ENGINEERED SYSTEMS READY TO DEPLOY PURPOSE-BUILT CONFIGURATIONS Open Systems (Disaggregated) Converged (HCI) AI/ML STANDARD RACK SIZE & POWER No data center redesign Leverage existing power
https://constructionblog.autodesk.com/as-built-drawings/ challenge in hardware over software – need “as-built” documentation the “ground truth” isn’t necessarily the most recent git commit
in the screws came e CAD b the in welds build
These are not pie in the sky ideas – they are already actively implemented under the aegis of the Open Compute Project and the Linux Foundation
members
projects
REAL WORLD EXAMPLES Blockheating uses the waste product of water cooled servers to greenhouses to produce tomatoes https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/itrenew-and-blockheating-combine-edge-data-centersgreenhouses/ Open Compute open specifications on heating, cooling, and rack design https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Open_Rack/SpecsAndDesigns https://www.opencompute.org/projects/advanced-cooling-facilities-incubation Open Compute Cross Project Sustainability Initiative https://www.opencompute.org/projects/sustainability-initiative
CASE STUDY – AMSTERDAM …FOR GREENHOUSES
CASE STUDY – AMSTERDAM Green data centers require innovative partners “WE’RE SAVING 20 – 30% ON AIR-CONDITIONING COSTS BY GOING WITH OUR DECENTRALIZED APPROACH. CONSTRUCTION TIMES ARE ALSO SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED. THOSE BENEFITS ALLOW US TO BE SUSTAINABLE AND ECONOMICALLY COMPETITIVE AT THE SAME TIME.” “WE CHOSE ITRENEW FOR THEIR SUSTAINABILITY CREDENTIALS, SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGY, ‘OPEN COMPUTE’ FLEXIBILITY, AND THE SKILL OF THEIR ENGINEERING TEAM TO DELIVER ON OUR REQUIREMENTS AT SCALE—ALL OF WHICH HAVE ENABLED US TO ACCELERATE OUR DEVELOPMENT.” JEROEN BURKS, CEO BLOCKHEATING
THE CIRCULAR IT HARDWARE INDUSTRY IN PRACTICE START HERE Design and procure hardware that enables circularity HYPERSCALE DATA CENTERS COST AVOIDANCE INTERNAL RE-USE 1 2 RACK-SCALE SOLUTIONS 3 EDGE SOLUTIONS 4 RE-CERTIFIED COMPONENTS 5 RESPONSIBLE RECYCLING LIFETIME VALUE MULTIPLIER IN AGGREGATE TARGET MARKETS • CSP/COLO • GAMING • INDUSTRIAL • IOT • RETAIL • ENERGY • TELCO • ENTERPRISE VALUE RECOVERY
CIRCULAR ECONOMY – SOFTWARE The circular economy enables - Near metal open source toolchains like coreboot, linuxboot, u-root to keep older machines in the market longer based on community support - Open hardware can be re-designed for new uses like modular datacenter, edge computing at near neutral carbon cost at cheaper TCO than new hardware - Open Hardware doesn’t just mean servers, but also switches - Augments software projects like LF’s OpenSwitch [https://www.openswitch.net/] - Any software project that supports using off the shelf parts to build open infrastructure can leverage the supply chain provided by the circular economy
SUMMARY YES – improve the software toolchain to improve open source projects so that the hardware is used at high utilization and high efficiency through efforts like the Green Software Foundation YES - leverage the supply chain of the circular economy and benefit from open hardware and near neutral carbon costs of recertified equipment YES - adapt your infrastructure to use open hardware that runs open source infrastructure hardware – e.g. SONiC, openswitch, k8s, OpenBMC YES – Find ways to re-use the output of your on-prem cloud or datacenter
Sustainability all the way down – means we don’t stop at just software but explore everything below it as well If you have a sustainability program at your company – leverage the OSPO to navigate the cross-silo collaboration required to support open sustainable infrastructure as well as open code
Photo acknowledgement and thanks: https://unsplash.com/photos/K5KmnZHv1Pg https://unsplash.com/photos/rmzQwpKt4XM https://unsplash.com/photos/oalS6SkZc_s https://unsplash.com/photos/MgtHZ4zlC1U https://unsplash.com/photos/k39RGHmLoV8 Tom Fisk from https://www.pexels.com/photo/yellow-excavator-2101137 Zetong Li from https://www.pexels.com/photo/green-leafed-plant-1784577 Aleksandar Pasaric from https://www.pexels.com/photo/view-of-cityscape-325185
Who are we? Sesame by ITRenew – building sustainable hardware solutions for hyperscalers and more – www.sesame.com Erik Riedel, SVP of Engineering, ITRenew Twitter: @er1p, @RiedelAtWork email: erik.riedel @ itrenew.com Sriram (Sri) Ramkrishna, Principal Ecosystems Engineer, ITRenew Twitter: @sramkrishna, email: sriram.ramkrishna @ itrenew.com
The ITRenew Difference Circular data center solutions that enable profitable, sustainable global growth for our customers Two decades working with hyperscale technology and data centers Operations worldwide with 11 facilities globally World’s most secure decommissioning & data sanitization 400+ employees Leader in driving the circular economy and data center transformation First-ever sustainably sourced open HW compute, storage and networking solutions
6.7 million cars’ annual emissions
In recent years, sustainability has become nagging concern in the open source ecosystem. With the recent incorporation of the Green Software Foundation, we are working to build more efficient software that lets you do more while reducing the use of carbon and electricity. The flip side is being concerned with the hardware itself. After all, if you’re building energy efficient software it’s reasonable to believe that hardware should also be a factor. Does it make sense to build efficient green software for an automobile that is mechanically inefficient? Sustainability should happen all the way down - and that is where the circular economy comes in. Through re-use and re-certification of IT components, we can build sustainable platforms that maximizes efficiency while simultaneously lowering our carbon footprint beyond what just software can do. At a time where we are concerned about the limited supply of rare earth metals and aggressive demand for more computational power - this conversation should happen now. So, let’s talk about sustainability all the way down and what that means for the software industry and sustainability programs around the world.
for free. You
can too.