Carbon

Digital Service Efficiency

Today the Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) metrics were published to drive transparency on data center and server usage.  Many internet provided services use large quantities of servers and are continually growing to scale up with demands.  It is very important to understand the overall efficiency of technical infrastructure from server design to the associated data centers running the servers.

With DSE we took a look at the quarter to annual impacts of server growth and the associated affects on costs, business enablers, energy consumption, and carbon emissions.  The combination of technical metrics with business impacts provides great information to make decisions to optimize both to strive for even better results over time.

With many technical infrastructures utilization can be very low, which means the manufacturing and usage of servers and data centers can represent a waste of resources.  The under-utilization of technical resources represents one of the challenges in the industry and a metric like DSE is a key step in pinpointing inefficiencies and either designing better overall solutions or optimizing already created solutions for re-use.

Old processors for electronic recycling

Old processors for electronic recycling

In the end all computers will eventually reach their end of useful life and need to be recycled.  It is up to us to make sure what what work was done during the active lifespan of any given computer was found to be as useful as possible.