The explosion of AI is putting immense pressure on our data centers – which begs the question, can we keep the lights on? 💡Host David Nicholson is joined by Dell Technologies‘ Matt Liebowitz, Global Portfolio Lead, Multicloud Professional Services, Dell, on this episode of Six Five On The Road at SC24, to discuss Dell’s approach to this challenge with its Sustainable Data Center Services. Matt discusses the critical need for sustainability in data centers, driven by the surge in AI and the consequent energy demand, regulatory pressures, and organizational commitments to carbon neutrality.
Tune in as they cover:
- The increased importance of sustainability in data centers due to rising AI demands, regulatory pressures, and energy costs
- Practical steps organizations can take toward more sustainable data center operations, including real-time power consumption monitoring and implementation of intelligent power and cooling management
- How Dell supports customers in achieving their sustainability goals for data centers with services like ProConsult Advisory and ongoing advisory support
- Dell’s unique approach to sustainable data centers, highlighting its service packages, partnerships with industry leaders, and commitment to innovation and customer support
Learn more at Dell Technologies.
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Transcript:
David Nicholson: Welcome to Six Five On The Road’s continuing coverage of SuperComputing 2024. I’m Dave Nicholson, and I’m joined by friend of the show, Matt Liebowitz. We’re here to talk about data center sustainability. Matt, what does that even mean to be sustainable?
Matt Liebowitz: Well, for many organizations… Let me… I’ll back up before I answer that. How many times have you seen in the public CEOs or heads of companies have made public commitments to either sustainability, carbon neutrality, or some other ESG goal? They can’t ignore their data centers. That’s a part of their business, right, especially large engineering firms and that’s companies that make use of a lot of compute. So combine that with the rise in AI, companies can no longer ignore their data centers as part of measuring their full greenhouse gas emissions and the impact that their data centers have. And so a sustainable data center is one that uses energy efficiently, that uses water efficiently. We don’t talk about the use of water enough in data centers, so using energy and water efficiently, and does so in a way that consumes as much renewable energy as possible and is, again, as efficient as possible so as to not be wasteful.
David Nicholson: Let’s not assume that everyone understands how either water or electricity is being used in the data center. I’m going to pretend that I think, well, sure, you’ve got the lights, and then you have the water that the folks who work there need to drink. But what else do we need to worry about?
Matt Liebowitz: We don’t… They can bring their own water from home. The water in a data center is used for the chillers, right, the equipment that can cool the rooms basically for the HVAC equipment. It can be used for direct liquid cooling if they’ve got large-scale AI servers where they have water usage there, and then electricity is all the IT equipment. So there’s obviously the lights, there’s the facility itself, the equipment, the energy that’s required there. But the IT equipment is what we really care most about. I think organizations for a long time have not really needed to worry about this as much, but with the rise of AI and with just a massive jump in energy consumption between what we would consider a traditional enterprise data center rack and that of AI-powered rack, it’s night and day. We’re talking six to ten times more power, sometimes even more, and in the future, it’s not going to get any better.
David Nicholson: So my understanding is that current, latest generation, if you will, technology from Dell provides racks that can draw 480 kilowatts of power at a time, and they’re engineered to be able to handle one megawatt in a rack at some point in the near future. What’s interesting about that is when we talk about sustainability, often the phrase sustainability conjures up this idea that we want to do things the right way, the responsible way, but we’ve reached an inflection point. I’d like to get your thoughts on this if you agree or disagree. We’ve reached an inflection point where sustainability means are we going to be able to actually sustain this at all? Can we do this at all? Not even can we do this in a good way that doesn’t harm the environment, but literally where are we going to get all the power? What are your thoughts on that? Do you agree that the conversation has changed over the last couple of years because of AI?
Matt Liebowitz: Yes. There’s two parts. I’ll start with… I’ll go in reverse order. You’re absolutely right. I think the world is quickly entering a phase where we might not have enough power for the growth in AI. I think, and I’m just spitballing, but I think the growth in data centers as a result of AI is probably going to be as significant or more significant as when we first saw cloud computing grow 15 years ago or more, where we’re going to start to see massive growth in data centers. So figuring out a few things. One, can I locate those data centers geographically close to renewable or clean energy sources? There’s not enough clean and renewable energy sources on the planet right now to satisfy that need. So figuring out how organizations and how the world is going to get power from these data centers is going to be a major focus, I think, of the next five to 10 years. I think we’re going to see, again, nuclear, small modular nuclear reactors start the growth there, the growth in renewable solar, hydro, wind as much as we can to get more power into the data centers. That’s the power part.
In terms of being sustainable for the organization, it’s not just can I be smart about my energy consumption. Can I reduce the total amount of kilowatt-hours that I’m consuming in my data center from an energy source that’s powered by coal or natural gas or something like that? There’s also the equipment in your data center itself. Are you recycling any of that equipment? Are you… Can you get that equipment to a recycling center so the rare earth elements and the equipment that’s in there, or the minerals that are in there can be recycled so they don’t sit in a landfill forever? So there’s not only the, can I be more sustainable on the energy side, reduce the power, reduce the water, but also am I being responsible with the equipment I have, how it’s being disposed of, and can I make intelligent decisions about the acquisition of new equipment?
David Nicholson: Yeah, I’d like to give a couple of data points to folks who just can’t wrap their head around the kind of power requirements that we’re talking about here. If we… So a kilowatt of power, if you translate that into horsepower, it’s 1.3 horsepower. So 100 kilowatts, which is about a fifth of what the kind of leading-edge Dell rack technology can deliver today, that’s 130 horsepower. That’s like an engine in a small car running at red line 24 hours a day in that rack that’s maybe, call it the size of a refrigerator. It’s completely insane. And we’re talking about getting to one megawatt being consumed on that floor tile. In Colorado, Colorado Springs in particular, at 8 cents a kilowatt-hour for electricity, if you run one megawatt in a data center 12 hours a day, your electric bill is going to be 25 or $30,000 a month. One rack. In the very near future, one rack of equipment.
So one thing we can trust people to do in the sustainability realm is act in their own best interest. And if you want to talk about being green, there’s a lot of green that goes into paying for that power. So, obviously, electricity and power efficiency is something that you are going to focus on, but what are some of the other things? If Dell is coming in with a services checklist of the checkboxes that people should be focusing on from a sustainability perspective, what are those things aside from power efficiency that people need to be aware of?
Matt Liebowitz: Well, so I love that analogy, by the way. If you’re not a car person, I’ll tell you the analogy that I use. It’s microwaves.
David Nicholson: Good, good.
Matt Liebowitz: Most microwaves operated around one point or 1,100 watts, or call it one kilowatt. So if you’ve got a megawatt of power, you are microwaving 1,000 hot pockets at the same time. So I mean, it’s not a small amount of energy. You’re absolutely right. In terms of the types of things that we do, as you said, it’s more than just, can I use energy efficiently? Most data centers, most enterprise data centers, are not comfortable operating their equipment at higher levels of utilization. If you look at a public cloud, for example, they’re very comfortable operating in the high 80, 85% utilization rates. An enterprise data center, much, much lower than that. So there’s waste in their existing equipment. So we want to help them drive up the utilization, utilize newer, more modern energy-efficient equipment. If they’re using old storage arrays that are using spinning disks, maybe they should look at something that’s powered by solid state that consumes far less power.
All of those types of things are the things that we try to help customers with to figure out ways that they can be more efficient in their data centers with consumption of energy. Again, I know we bring up water a lot, but water’s not a big deal if you’re running your data center in a location that’s not starved, that doesn’t have… the water’s plentiful, right. But if you’re standing up data centers in locations like California where there’s frequent water shortages, or in Asia or Northern Africa where there’s significant shortages of water, the amount of consumption of water that you use and that data center is going to impact the local environment. And so we want to make sure organizations are being smart about that.
David Nicholson: Well, on the subject of water, talk about direct liquid cooling and how that can change the game and kind of tilt us in the direction of sustainability if so.
Matt Liebowitz: Yeah, so the two common ways that organizations can cool their equipment are air cooling and water cooling. Now, there’s a third way, which is known as immersion cooling, where they immerse the server in this non-electrically conductive oil or liquid. That is probably less common. But the two most common are air and water. Now, air is pretty efficient at removing heat from a system, but water is far more efficient at taking heat out of the system so it doesn’t get… it doesn’t just move into the environment, right. In air cooling, you’re kind of pushing the air out. With water cooling, you can take the air out, put it into the water, which can absorb far more heat. It can go to a radiator. Just like a car, it works… Same as if you drive a gas-powered car. It works exactly the same. You take the heat out, you put it in the water, you move it over to a radiator that’s cooled when you move that cooled water back into the system.
We’re, I think, going to see the growth of liquid cooling in AI significantly in the next probably five years. And this is one area where I think Dell innovates really well. We have direct liquid cooling solutions for our AI-enabled XE servers that I think we’re seeing more and more demand every single day. So it’s a more efficient way of removing heat from a system.
David Nicholson: What about recovering energy from that now heated water? Is that getting into the realm of absurdity, or is that something that realistically will happen down the line? Instead of using energy to radiate heat out and cool the water in a traditional way, what if we can use that heat, put that heat to good use? The first thing that comes to mind is hot tubs in a data center, of course. But seriously, are there ways to recover energy from that heat in the future or today?
Matt Liebowitz: Hot tubs in the data center is the kind of thinking that we need in leadership around here. I like it. So there are some organizations that are doing that to heat. For example, if the data center is geographically located right next to the building where the company operates, they can move some of that heat from that data center into the building to reduce the need for forced hot air. They can reuse that heat. There was actually a small data center in the UK that pushed their hot air over to a local YMCA to heat their swimming pool. Great idea. The main challenge with that is that water loses heat very quickly over long distances. And so, it would be difficult for a data center in a city to warm or use that energy for the local suburbs. So I think we’re going to see that most in locations where the data center is located close to another facility, whether it’s an office building or something else where that waste heat can be used more efficiently. But I think for now, we’re… other than hot tubs in the data center, which again, I fully support, I think we’re going to see use of that heat or that heated water into a radiator back into the system or to heat the local buildings.
David Nicholson: Well, I liked your visual of 1,000 microwave ovens when talking… you’re trying to kind of characterize power consumption to folks so people can get their head around it. The dissipation of heat that’s required is another thing that can kind of be visualized. If you ask the question, how much heat do we have to dissipate if you’re giving a system one kilowatt or one kilowatt-hour of electricity? It’s basically 99% of that is transmogrified into heat. It’s almost like the compute is a bonus that we get from generating heat from electricity. It really is crazy. And so, back to that thousand-watt example, what is a hairdryer? 1,000, 1,500 watts for a hairdryer-
Matt Liebowitz: -when my wife turns hers on.
David Nicholson: Yeah. So think about the energy. Just think about the heat blowing out of that 1,500-watt thing, now increased that 10x 100x. It’s massive and massive amounts of heat. So Dell has been in the IT business forever. This all feels like the realm of electricians and plumbers. So are you figuring this out all in your own, or do you have significant partnerships that are developed? Because frankly, I don’t trust that the same person who’s good at dragging Cat 5 cable is competent in connecting connectors that have to prevent water from getting on my $50,000 GPUs. So what’s the story there?
Matt Liebowitz: Yeah, it’s a great question. So a couple of things. One, within Dell’s consulting service organization, we have tons of history of helping customers in their data centers around transformation. So migration consolidation, geographically locating them closest to where they need to be. So we have a lot of reputation there, a lot of great experience, but we do have partnerships that we work with, including companies like Schneider Electric. It’s a great example of what you were talking about before. Where does that heat go when you’re trying to dissipate all that heat? Especially with air cooling, it has to go somewhere. We work with Schneider. We use some of their software to do computational fluid dynamics, essentially mapping.
In the data center where the hot air goes, when it leaves that server, when it leaves that rack, can we design it in such a way so that we can contain it to the hot aisle versus the cold aisle? These are things that organizations that have built a data center over a long time, maybe they did that in the beginning, but they haven’t really done that as their data center has grown organically. We find things like cables running under the floors, restricting airflow, all those types of things. And so, we do this CFD analysis to figure out where the hot air is going and how we can improve it. Our services teams can actually help them design their rack layouts such that they don’t… we can reduce some of that waste heat and make sure it goes into the right place. So yes, we have our own experienced people, but we also have strong partnerships, like with Schneider, where we bring… we go to the market together with them.
David Nicholson: So Matt, at a certain level, everyone’s data center is a bespoke, unique, completely different environment. So it’s one thing to say, “Dell sustainability services, we’ll come in and help you with everything,” but have you done anything to make sense of this? I know you can’t productize something that ends up being a very specific service, but what can you tell me about kind of the fundamentals of what you do? Do you have basic packages or guidance that you give people?
Matt Liebowitz: We do, yes. Some of this has launched at SuperCompute 24. So we have three consulting services that we’ve launched that coincide with Dell’s long history of sustainability services around asset recovery, recycling, and things like that. But we start with what we refer to as pro-consult advisory, which is where we help customers develop a roadmap and a strategy to how to go from that bespoke data center you just spoke about to something that’s more sustainable with a plan and a roadmap and a framework for how to get there. But then we also introduce what we call implementation services for sustainable data centers, which is sort of like phase two. You’ve got this roadmap and a strategy, and you know how to get there, but maybe you just need some help with how to do it. Our implementation services where we have… again, we partner with companies like Schneider to come in and actually implement those strategies, implement the change that’s needed to be more sustainable. And then, finally, we’ve launched something we call advisory subscription services for sustainable data centers.
And think about that as a way for customers to stay engaged with Dell over a period of months, two years, to make sure that they’re staying on target, hitting their KPIs, have the data that they need visible to report up to their boards of directors and their stakeholders. We stay engaged with them to make sure they’re hitting their sustainability goals. So we want to be a customer’s partner over the long term for their sustainability journey. We don’t want to just come in, do a bunch of stuff and leave. We want to stay with them on their journey, and we feel these services can help them do that.
David Nicholson: Yeah, making it easy. That’s great. It reminds me of the, I’m going to date myself, Calgon Take Me Away.
Matt Liebowitz: I remember that one.
David Nicholson: Relaxing idea because CIOs and CTOs are at their wit’s end trying to figure this stuff out. So I really like the third part of that, making sure that the metrics can be communicated to where they need to be communicated because things under the heading of ESG at the boardroom level are critically important at this point. Well, I just want to remind everyone that this question of sustainability has changed from simply a conversation about doing things the right way, the environmentally sustainable way. It’s changed to a point where if you can’t do things sustainably, you can’t do them at all. Literally, it’s unsustainable the direction we’re heading now without significant changes in how we generate power, how we dissipate heat.
Matt, it’s great to hear the passion that you and your team have for this subject. I know it’s super interesting getting in and crawling around the weeds of kilowatt-hours and BTUs and all of that and eking out efficiency. And the great news is, again, the green pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is environmental responsibility and money. With that, again, Matt Liebowitz, Dell Technologies, thank you very much for being here with us on Six Five On The Road’s continuing coverage of SuperComputing 2024.
Author Information
David Nicholson is Chief Research Officer at The Futurum Group, a host and contributor for Six Five Media, and an Instructor and Success Coach at Wharton’s CTO and Digital Transformation academies, out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business’s Arresty Institute for Executive Education.
David interprets the world of Information Technology from the perspective of a Chief Technology Officer mindset, answering the question, “How is the latest technology best leveraged in service of an organization’s mission?” This is the subject of much of his advisory work with clients, as well as his academic focus.
Prior to joining The Futurum Group, David held technical leadership positions at EMC, Oracle, and Dell. He is also the founder of DNA Consulting, providing actionable insights to a wide variety of clients seeking to better understand the intersection of technology and business.