Sustainability

The OCP Sustainability Project works to enable the data center industry’s progress toward net-carbon-zero goals by addressing the challenges and opportunities within the OCP ecosystem. It led the introduction of Sustainability as OCP’s fifth tenet and offers an open framework and resources for vendors, suppliers, and end users to deploy best practices that promote reusability and circularity. Its goals are to reimagine system and component design for circularity, deliver a roadmap for standardized calculation, measurement, and disclosure of metrics across the life cycle, publish guidelines on supply-side resource consumption, and develop OCP-certified design and sourcing practices.

Sustainability

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Steering Committee Representative

Shruti Sethi

Project Leads

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About This Project

The data center industry is moving towards net-carbon-zero goals over the coming decade. The OCP Sustainability Project is working to enable progress towards industry goals by addressing the unique challenges and opportunities presented within the Open Compute Project ecosystem. The Sustainability Project led the introduction of Sustainability as the fifth tenet of OCP.

Leveraging the expertise of the OCP community, we offer an open framework and resources for OCP members and the data center industry — vendors, suppliers, and end users — to deploy industry best practices that promote reusability and circularity.

Scope

The Sustainability Project’s goals are to:

  • Reimagine Design : identify key steps in system and component design that require reimagination to promote reusability and circularity
  • Standardize Metrics : deliver a roadmap to increase standardization of calculation, measurement, and disclosure of metrics across the IT product and data center life cycle
  • Publish Guidelines : publish how-to guidelines that offer frameworks for supply-side resource consumption and its implications on our common value chain
  • Circular Practices : develop OCP-certified design and sourcing practices and create circular operating modes

Resources

Disclaimer: Please do not submit any confidential information. All presentation materials, proposals, meeting minutes and/or supporting documents are published by OCP and are open to the public in accordance to OCP’s Bylaws and IP Policy. This can be found on the OCP OCP Policies page. If you have any questions please contact OCP.

Mission:

The data center industry is at the forefront of ever increasing power usage and greenhouse gas emissions in an age when climate change impacts are hard to ignore. OCP Sustainability is working to enable progress towards industry goals by addressing unique challenges and opportunities presented within the Open Compute Project ecosystem. Leveraging the expertise of the OCP community, we offer an open framework and resources for OCP members and data center industry – vendors, suppliers, and end users – to deploy industry best practices that promotes reusability and circularity.

Goals:

Identify key steps in system and component design that require reimagination to promote reusability and circularity. Deliver roadmap to increase standardization of calculation, measurement, and disclosure of metrics across the IT product and data center life cycle. Publish (how-to) guidelines to offer frameworks for a supply-side resource consumption and implications on our common value chain Develop OCP-certified design and sourcing practices and creating circular operating modes.

Scope of Work:

Mission: The primary mission of this workstream is to identify industry best practices that can be shared across vendors, suppliers as well as end user behavior that promotes re-usability and circularity. With a focus to understand and explain circularity from technical and operational point of view, the workstream is investigating key elements in system and component design, and how to design with reusability in mind.

History

– Historical Context

Initiative Leadership

– Alexander Rakow (Schneider Electric) – Rishab Vardhan Harikrishnan (Oracle)

Documents

– OCP White Paper, Sustainability as the Fifth Tenant – Data Sanitization for the Circular Economy – 2022 Monthly Meeting Minutes – OCP White Paper, Sustainability Initiative – OCP White Paper, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Guidelines for Cloud Providers – Introduction to Design for Circularity Guide – Design for Circularity Guide

Recordings from Past Calls

General Sustainability Call Recordings

202620252024202320222021

Sustainability Workstreams

Carbon Accounting for Circularity

– Working Group Home Page – There is no standardized way to report the carbon emissions for circular business models. How can reporting incentivize circularity?

2024

OCP Sustainability Project Calendar

These meetings are recorded via audio and video. By participating you consent that these recordings may be made publicly available. Any presentation materials, proposals and meeting minutes are published on the respective project’s wiki page and are open to the public in accordance to OCP’s Bylaws and IP Policy. This can be found at https://www.opencompute.org/about/ocp-policies/. If you have any questions please contact OCP.

The General Sustainability Project meets every second Wednesday of the month, and alternates between 8:00-9:30 Pacific time and 17:00-18:30 Pacific time.

Please join my meeting from your computer, tablet or smartphone.

– General Sustainability Initiative Call Link

Dial by your location

– +1 929 205 6099 US (New York) – +1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC) – +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) – +1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma) – +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston) – +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose) – Meeting ID: 894 5834 7254 – Find your local number

Sustainability calendar

Related Details

Contributions

All project contributions

Sub-Projects

Carbon Label Standardization

The Carbon Disclosure / Supplier Carbon Label Standardization Workstream is a workstream of the OCP Sustainability Project. Its mission is to create a standard carbon disclosure format that can be used to transparently share embodied carbon and its relevant information across value chain members, so that suppliers, vendors, and end users describe embodied carbon in a consistent, comparable way. It also works toward standardized supplier carbon labels.

Carbon Modeling

The Carbon Modeling Workstream is a workstream of the OCP Sustainability Project focused on embodied carbon: the CO2e emitted by the manufacture of the physical entities within a data center. Because embodied carbon cannot be directly measured, it must be modeled, which gives the workstream its name. It addresses three challenges: data access (obtaining the best estimates of embodied CO2e from the supply chain and researchers), data opacity (understanding the methods used to estimate it along the supply chain), and data grade (summarizing the quality and completeness of those estimates).

Circularity

Circularity is a Workstream under the OCP Sustainability Project. Its mission is to take a vertical technical-ecosystem approach, rather than a horizontal one, to managing secondary-life equipment, so that complete servers, switches, and other data center components are refurbished and reused in new installations instead of being torn down or sold piecemeal. Paired with interlinked engineering equipment, the approach gives the original data center client full data-analytics capability for decision making. Cascading equipment into secondary-life installations, including immersion-cooled ones, offers a more sustainable and cost-effective solution.

Data Center Efficiency Metrics

The Data Center Efficiency Metrics (DCEM) / Sustainability Metrics Workstream is a workstream of the OCP Sustainability Project. Its mission is to define data center infrastructure efficiency metrics, the requirements for measuring and disclosing them, and the mechanisms for measurement. The workstream partners with software developers and data center operators to create an ecosystem that broadly supports sustainability metrics through standards-based mechanisms.

Embodied Carbon

Embodied Carbon is a Workstream under the OCP Sustainability Project, which works to enable the data center industry’s progress toward net-carbon-zero goals. Embodied carbon is the CO2e emitted by the manufacture of the physical entities within a data center; it cannot be directly measured and is instead modeled. Details about the workstream’s mission, scope, deliverables, and ways to get involved will be added in the near future.

Lifecycles

Lifecycles is a Sub-Project under the OCP Sustainability Project, which works to enable the data center industry’s progress toward net-carbon-zero goals and promotes reusability and circularity across the IT product and data center life cycle. Details about its mission, leadership, scope, and ways to get involved will be added in the near future.

Metrics Life Cycle Assessment

Metrics Life Cycle Assessment is a Workstream under the OCP Sustainability Project, which works to enable the data center industry’s progress toward net-carbon-zero goals, including standardizing the calculation, measurement, and disclosure of metrics across the IT product and data center life cycle. Details about the workstream’s mission, leadership, scope, and ways to get involved will be added in the near future.

Operational Resilience

The Operational Resilience (OpRes) Workstream is a workstream of the OCP Sustainability Project. Its mission is to advance the operational resilience of data center infrastructure through a dual climate lens, addressing both the impact of climate on data centers and the impact of data centers on the environment. It develops frameworks, climate indices, metrics, and best practices to help data centers maintain reliability and efficiency under climate-related volatility, while driving meaningful reductions in environmental impact through operational efficiency and sustainability.

Power Telemetry

Power Telemetry is a Sub-Project under the OCP Sustainability Project, which works to enable the data center industry’s progress toward net-carbon-zero goals, including a roadmap for standardized calculation, measurement, and disclosure of metrics across the IT product and data center life cycle. Details about the sub-project’s mission, scope, and ways to get involved will be added in the near future.

Water Efficiency Metrics & Grading

The Water Efficiency Metrics & Grading Workstream is a workstream of the OCP Sustainability Project. It is establishing water efficiency metrics for data centers, because current metrics are not detailed enough: they do not account for geography and do not represent enough variation in the water and replenishment systems in use. The workstream is also working out how to communicate a facility’s resource efficiency to non-experts and how to communicate use of the metric to the wider industry.