HP Plans to Reduce Carbon Footprint of Data Centers by 75%

Hewlett-Packard revealed some of its plans to develop technologies that would help reducing power usage in data centers. The company also announced that it intends to create software and an open online community with the purpose of offering support to the manufacturers that seek to discover more sustainable consumer products.

The company has developed a five-year strategy for the sustainability arm of its HP Labs, revealed by the efforts. The strategy has been revised and patched up in March, yet HP refused to disclose the budget allocated. The only thing we know is that the company invested $3.6 billion last year in research and development.

The Sustainable Data Center project is included in the new research, aimed at reducing with 75 percent the carbon footprint from building, operating, and dismantling data centers. Another project from the strategy is HP's Photonic Interconnect, built upon the idea of replacing copper wiring in servers with laser-based communication.

"We want to dematerialize the data center," said Chandrakant Patel, HP fellow and director of HP's Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab. "Imagine circuit boards in close proximity that communicate with light." According to Patel, optical laser connections within server equipment offer much more flexibility and are also around 20 times more efficient than copper wires. The laser connections can have ranges between 100 nanometers to 100 meters.

"Because of our history of nanotechnology, we have the ability to build these kinds of things," Patel said, referring to work at HP in building lasers into chips. "We believe we can scale to data center scale, which is easily 100 to 200 racks."

Patel said that his hopes are targeting the creation of a Web-based "sustainability hub" by 2009. The purpose of this hub would be to gather research and data from engineers, scientists, and other experts around the world. In his opinion, this would help creating models of the carbon emissions and the energy used to create myriad consumer products, all set up upon Lifetime Exergy Advisor software developed by HP Labs and the University of California at Berkeley.

According to Patel, at the present moment, though there are tools that measure the carbon footprint of electronics and other consumer goods, not all aspects of manufacturing and disposal are being taken into account. He said, as an example, that the energy used to extract the necessary quantity of aluminum for a laptop equals the energy that laptop uses to operate for two years.

"How do we come up with an irrefutable metric that says what we are doing is sustainable?" Patel asked. "We look at the life cycle of a product, from the time material is extracted from the ground to the time it is reclaimed or recycled. How do we use appropriate materials so we don't create environmental headaches?"

Patel's idea consists in converting into joules (a measurement of energy) all the steps of a life circle of a product, starting with the mining and going up to powering a factory and to disposing of toxic materials.

HP Labs researchers are also conducting tests and analyze means of transforming commercial printing and publishing so that it would use only digital printing and electronic paper. This way, the amount of used resources and energy would drop considerably, a result which may influence other industries to adopt energy efficient technologies.