History of the OCP Sustainability Initaive
Welcome:
History of the OCP Sustainability Project.
Original idea of developing Sustainability within Open Compute Project was introduced by Dharmesh Jani (DJ)[Meta Inc and IC Co-chair] for consideration as a strategic initiative for 2021. The Open Compute Project (OCP) initiated a journey toward sustainability on December 3, 2020, when Dharmesh Jani (DJ) presented sustainability as a strategic idea to the incubation committee. Among 14 proposals, sustainability received unanimous support and was ranked as the top priority by the committee and volunteer leadership of the OCP project. In 2021, a core team was established to spearhead sustainability efforts with focus on Circularity and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The Sustainability Initiative Leadership for 2021 consisted of Dharmesh Jani (DJ), Jordan Tse from Meta, John Miranda from Intel, and Fahmida Bangert from IT Renew. First few months of 2021 were spent in developing the two initial work streams that attracted the most interest:
1. Metrics Development and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): Led by Jordan Tse (Meta), this workstream focused on defining methods for assessing environmental impact throughout the life cycle of certified OCP components, systems, and devices. The goal was to publish metrics and methodologies to enhance the design, development, and deployment of sustainable data center infrastructure, reducing carbon footprint with each new generation.
2. Lifecycle Systems and Components: Led by John Miranda (Intel) and Fahmida Bangert (IT Renew), this workstream aimed to identify industry best practices that encourage reusability and circularity. The workstream explored system and component design, emphasizing the highest level of consumption and reusability.
The core team engaged 11 top-level OCP projects, which embraced sustainability and pursued various efforts, including modular systems, circularity design, data center facilities sustainability, immersion and liquid cooling, and heat reuse.
During 2H-2021, Dharmesh Jani (DJ) proposed incorporating Sustainability as the fifth tenet of OCP, expanding upon the original four tenets of Open, Scale, Impact, and Efficiency established in 2011. Following significant progress in 2021 and 2022, Sustainability became the 12th top-level project in October 2022 and was announced at the 12th OCP Global Summit held in San Jose on October 18, 2022. This marked a milestone in OCP's dedication to promoting sustainable practices within the organization.
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.
Sustainability Initiative Leadership
- -Dharmesh Jani (Meta, OCP IC Co-chair)
Call 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 http://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.