Data Center Sustainability: Technologies and Practices
Data center operators face pressure to cut costs while keeping up with increasing workload demands. Intel’s holistic approach to data center sustainability gives you the technology and intelligence you need to accelerate performance for demanding workloads and proactively manage energy efficiency.
Accelerate Data Center Sustainability with a Holistic Approach
Data centers need to store and process massive amounts of data. As more businesses support emerging workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), and high performance computing (HPC), they’re generating exponentially more data. As data generation soars, so do the cost and power needed to run data centers and servers.
At Intel, we’re helping organizations like yours meet business demands for increased storage and faster networking and HPC while optimizing the data center for greater energy efficiency and less hardware waste. Intel’s end-to-end approach to data center sustainability—across hardware, software, services, and tools—can help you improve efficiency, save energy, and lower your total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 75 percent,1 all while reducing your carbon footprint and supporting your environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy.
Uncover End-to-End Data Center Sustainability
A sustainable data center must optimize every watt used across compute, storage, cooling, and networking—not just the performance of one component. Explore sustainable technologies and practices, and learn how Intel can help accelerate your data center sustainability initiative.
Improve Server Efficiency and Performance
Improve Server Efficiency and Performance
Servers use the most power of all equipment in the data center.2 As a result, the most-effective way to drive data center sustainability and reduce costs is by improving energy efficiency and optimizing power consumption.2 Intel offers a range of hardware and software technologies that can help you stay on the cutting edge of demanding workloads while optimizing compute resources across the entire data center.
Maximize Server Infrastructure Use
For many organizations, server usage is less than 50 percent, sometimes reaching as low as 20 percent; yet electricity is consumed continuously.2 Decommissioning a single server can help to save thousands of dollars in energy, operating system licenses, and hardware maintenance costs annually.2 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors can consolidate five servers’ worth of data into a single server,1 freeing up data center rack space by up to 80 percent1 and reducing CO2 emissions by up to 60 percent.1
Optimize Your Server Platform for Critical Workloads
Built into 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel® Accelerator Engines combine high-bandwidth memory and software optimizations to help you maximize CPU resources to optimize AI, security, network, storage, and HPC workloads. Using integrated accelerators, 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors deliver up to 2.9x better performance per watt compared to previous generations3 for real-world workloads—not synthetic benchmarks like SPECint.
Proactively Manage Power Use with AI Features
Built-in telemetry and power management tools in 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors allow you to intelligently manage server health. Using your data center manager software of choice, you can monitor factors like power consumption and thermal efficiency to help identify problems, better understand energy consumption in your data center, and extend the life of your hardware. With an optimized power mode feature, the processor anticipates power demand and enable servers to save power in the usage range that customers run the most, delivering up to 20 percent socket power savings with little to no performance impact.4
Enable More Energy-Efficient AI and ML Training
Intel offers purpose-built processors to power AI and ML workloads with more energy-efficient deep learning training. 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors provide an up to 14x energy efficiency increase3 for select AI inference workloads. For AI machine learning, Habana® Gaudi®2 servers provide an up to 1.8x increase5 in energy efficiency over a leading competitor processor, giving you almost twice the training for the same power consumed.
Extend Hardware Life with Modular Architecture
Modular server design that allows you to easily replace or upgrade individual components such as compute, memory, and I/O—instead of the entire system—can help you to reduce waste and extend the life of your hardware. The first specification for this open server architecture is available now through the Open Compute Project (OCP) .
Unlock More-Efficient Storage
Unlock More-Efficient Storage
Companies spend a lot of money every year to store and protect a single terabyte of data. IT spending hit an all-time high in 20226 and is expected to climb as more businesses integrate emerging technologies such as AI, 5G, and IoT, which generate exponentially more data. Companies with inefficient storage solutions face a range of new costs, higher power consumption, and increased carbon emission. With built-in accelerators and AI capabilities, Intel® processors can help you make the most of your power budget and power consumption as storage demands grow.
Improve Data Compression and Encryption Efficiency
Intel® Quick Assist Technology (Intel® QAT) enables data centers to compress and encrypt data more efficiently, at scale, using fewer hardware resources and less power. As a built-in accelerator in 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel® QAT completes data compression and decompression up to 3.2x faster7 when performing backup and archiving for application data or distributed storage systems and data lakes. Storage, big data, databases, virtual machines, and container migration can be efficiently compressed and encrypted without bogging down your CPU.
Use AI to Improve Data Compression and Energy Use
Up to 73 percent of data created by enterprises goes unused for analytics but is stored anyway.8 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors use built-in AI capabilities that can distinguish between useful and superfluous data, helping to make data storage more efficient and less costly to businesses and the environment.
Improve TCO with Intel-Verified Cooling Solutions
Cooling and power consume the second largest amount of power in the data center, at 39 percent of total consumption.2 High-efficiency cooling techniques such as advanced air and liquid cooling can reduce power usage effectiveness (PUE) across the data center to help you save energy, reduce water use, and lower TCO. Intel’s liquid-cooling system ecosystem collaboration and validation gives you a trusted shortcut to choosing the right cooling solution to reduce both energy consumption and physical infrastructure across the data center. Plus, only Intel offers processor SKUs optimized for liquid-cooled systems.
Advanced Air Cooling
Warm air circulation with advanced heatsink techniques, pioneered by Intel IT, can help bring data center PUE down to 1.2. Air cooling solutions can be easily implemented in all types of existing data centers.
Cold Plate Liquid Cooling
Using high-thermal-efficiency liquid to draw heat energy from IT equipment, liquid cooling delivers more-efficient cooling than air and dramatically reduces power consumption for individual server components. Cold plate cooling can also reach nearly 60 percent of heat recapture, allowing you to capture and recycle heat generated from IT equipment. Intel collaborates directly with cold plate partners and offers solution validation. Explore the ZutaCore HyperCool cold plate solution, which is certified for Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.
Liquid Immersion Cooling
By using advanced techniques to submerge the entire server in liquid that’s free of per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS), liquid immersion cooling solutions drive PUE to as little as 1.03. Liquid immersion can also achieve 100 percent of heat recapture, enabling heat resell or reuse opportunities such as heating buildings or heating greenhouses to grow food. As more businesses build 5G networks and deploy data centers at the edge, immersion cooling can cool servers where traditional air-based cooling solutions don’t fit or aren’t feasible because of air pollution. Intel is partnering with companies such as Green Revolution Cooling and Submer to help scale liquid immersion cooling technologies.
Enable End-to-End Network Sustainability
Enable End-to-End Network Sustainability
As network traffic—and the energy required to support it—continue to grow, data center sustainability programs must extend beyond the servers that perform compute functions and include the network that connects data centers and the clients they serve. By increasing power optimization and expanding the control of the hardware and software that power data center and network deployments, Intel helps network operators gain the intelligence needed to dramatically improve power efficiency across all computing—at the edge, on-premises, and in the cloud.
Sustainably Supercharge Your 5G Network’s vRAN Deployment
Delivering exceptional performance per watt, 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors deliver twice the throughput capacity for vRAN workloads without increasing power.9 Plus, through built-in vRAN acceleration, Intel® vRAN Boost can reduce compute power by up to 20 percent in addition to the performance-per-watt gains10 of 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.
Intelligently Manage Power Use with Built-in Tools
Built-in telemetry and power-management tools in Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors enable carbon-aware computing, allowing you to use AI to predict peak loads across your network and tune CPU frequencies to reduce electricity use when demand is lower.
Optimize CPU Resources with Cloud-Native Software
By continually recalibrating the power states of individual cores based on changing workload requirements, Intel® Intelligent Power Manager for 5G Core software running on 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors delivers an average power savings of 30 percent while maintaining key telco performance metrics.11
Maximize Ethernet Efficiency and Performance
Optimizing your server’s Ethernet network adapter can help achieve more-sustainable outcomes by reducing latency and improving packet processing performance and efficiency for cloud, communication, and network edge workloads. With Dynamic Device Personalization (DDP) software for the Intel® Ethernet 800 Series, you can configure packet processing capabilities for specific protocols and not waste CPU resources examining each packet.
Increase Data Center Efficiency with the Intel® End-to-End Portfolio
Intel’s end-to-end approach to sustainability can help you efficiently scale your data center to enable emerging workloads from edge to cloud. Optimize performance where you need it while gaining the system intelligence you need to measure, monitor, and minimize power consumption.
Hardware Optimized for Demanding Workloads
Intelligent Software and Tools
Find the Right Intel® Xeon® Processor for Your Needs
Discover the sustainable impact Intel® Xeon® processors can make across your data center. In the on-premises section of our Intel® Xeon® Processor Advisor, use our sustainability tools to forecast energy savings and find the right processor for you. Sign in or create an account to get started.
Find Sustainable Data Center Resources
Discover information, guides, and reports about sustainability in data centers.
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
Data centers consume enormous amounts of energy and resources. Data centers represent approximately 1 percent of global electricity demand and account for about 0.3 percent of global carbon emissions.12 As many data centers expand operations to support emerging technologies and greater storage capacity, the cost to the environment threatens to grow in lockstep. Many forward-thinking organizations are incorporating sustainable technologies and practices to reduce their carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions and support their ESG strategy. As they do so, many are also realizing cost savings by decommissioning unneeded hardware and reducing energy and water consumption.
Sustainable technologies, practices, and strategies can help businesses improve their sustainability impact across the data center. Data center sustainability practices include choosing processors manufactured with renewable energy, building a server infrastructure with energy-efficient hardware optimized for complex workloads, implementing modular servers to help extend product life, using AI and software tools that monitor energy consumption and adapt to workload demand, and installing advanced cooling solutions that save electricity and enable heat reuse.
Product and Performance Information
See [E11] at intel.com/processorclaims: 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Results may vary.
“How to Make the Data Center Eco-Friendly,” Gartner, December 6, 2022.
See [E1] at intel.com/processorclaims: 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Results may vary.
See [E6] at intel.com/processorclaims: 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Results may vary.
“Taking on the Compute and Sustainability Challenges of Generative AI,” Intel, March 28, 2023.
“Gartner forecasts worldwide IT spending to grow 4.3% in 2023,” Gartner, July 19, 2023.
“Accelerate cryptographic operations and data compression workloads with Intel QAT,” Intel, July 18, 2023.
“Hadoop is data’s darling for a reason,” Forrester, January 21, 2016.
See [N10] at intel.com/processorclaims: 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Results may vary.
See [N9] at intel.com/processorclaims: 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Results may vary.
Tested by Intel as of January 26, 2023. One node, 2x Intel® Xeon® Gold 6438N CPU, 32 cores, Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology enabled; Intel® Turbo Boost Technology disabled; total memory 512 GB (16x 32 GB DDR5 4800 MT/s [4000 MT/s]); BIOS EGSDCRB1.SYS.0090.D03.2210040200; microcode 0x2b0000c0; 2x Intel® E810-2CQDA2 (CVL, Chapman Beach, Total – 4x100G ports); 1x 223.6G INTEL® SSDSC2KB240G8; 1x 745.2G INTEL® SSDSC2BA800G3, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 5.15.0-27-generic; GCC 7.5.0; DPDK 22.11. intel.com/content/www/us/en/wireless-network/core-network/infrastructure-power-manager-solution-brief.html.
“Data centres and data transmission networks,” International Energy Agency (IEA), September 2022.