TCO2: Analyzing the Carbon Footprint of Database Server Replacements

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Abstract

Data centers produce a significant and increasing amount of CO 2 emissions. In the past, these have been predominantly due to energy generation for powering data centers. With the transition to energy sources with lower carbon production, the embodied carbon (i.e., CO 2 and other greenhouse gas emissions during production, transport, and end-of-life) plays an increasing role when planning server lifecycles. While replacing an old server with newer hardware will typically reduce the power consumption of individual tasks, due to better efficiency of modern CPUs, offsetting the embodied carbon of new hardware can take months to tens of years, depending on the grid carbon intensity. In this demo, we invite attendees to interactively analyze the ecological lifecycles of modern database servers for different workloads and grid carbon intensities. Attendees can compare servers with different CPU architectures and estimate ecological deployment cycles for database servers.