Interact has been awarded an IEMA prize for circular economy. The recognition sits underneath a research finding the rest of the market has yet to absorb: with the right component level upgrades, the immediate past generation of server hardware can out-perform the latest.
That overturns a quietly held assumption in data centre procurement. The working principle for decades has been that each new generation roughly doubles in efficiency, and the cheapest carbon outcome is therefore always to refresh to the newest available. The measured evidence does not support that claim. Once Moore's Law slows, as it has, the refurbished option starts to win on both cost and energy across most workload profiles. That changes the case for a circular approach to IT hardware substantially.
The research is the product of a two-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the University of East London. The peer-reviewed paper sets out the experimental design, the slow-down in Moore's Law, and the return-on-investment calculations for refresh decisions involving new versus refurbished machines. It is available here.
Sarah Mukherjee, CEO of IEMA, framed the award in her closing remarks: action on the climate crisis requires business and industry to step up and lead the change. The Interact team is glad to be part of it.
The IEMA Sustainability Impact Awards 2020 were sponsored by VolkerWessels UK and RRC International.