Here is a great blog series that engineer, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote up on the circular datacenter and its important to open source.
A quick picture:
h/t Wikipedia
The circular datacenter is built upon a supply chain extracted from first tier datacenter components from top tier hyperscalers like Google, Dropbox, Facebook, and others. The components are re-certified and then re-sold to 2nd tier markets.
Long term support of this hardware requires investment in open firmware and BIOS to replace decreasing ODM support. By moving the equipment to community support we can keep these hardware out of landfills and continue to be useful for years to come.
By using this supply chain, instead of buying new you reduce the carbon footprint. The carbon cost of manufacturing silicon and their components are already paid and the supply chain can be local.
Since the equipment is already in the field it means that the equipment is many factors cheaper than buying new with an excellent price per perforamnce.
The circular datacenter business model absolutely depends on open source and open hardware ecosystems leveraging the open data center through projects like the Open Compute Project.
Our President, Ali Fenn - has a talk about the carbon savings about the circular datacenter!
You can watch the video from Ali here. It is also available on the front page.
Chat with us at our booth if you want to learn more!
Online / 6 & 7 February 2021
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium Licence. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/be/deed.en or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. All content such as talks and biographies is the sole responsibility of the speaker.
