Sustainability

Research opportunities and challenges

Sustainability in the information technology (IT) context means creating technologies, IT infrastructure, and new business models that promote low emissions, save money and leave a lighter footprint on the environment.

IT companies like HP can not only make operational improvements such as consolidating datacenters, designing datacenters for thermal efficiency and virtualizing resources to become more environmentally responsible; they can help their customers do the same. A new generation of sustainable IT services is being innovated that deconstruct conventional physical infrastructure and make possible low-carbon improvements across business operations and product life cycles. Plethora opportunities exist to make improvements across the value chain: in supply chain, in materials and energy consumption, in IT system architecture and physical design, and in innovative tools and models to optimize resource allocation.

For more information on HP Labs' work in this area, see Innovating for the Environment.

HP Labs research in Sustainability includes one large project:

Sustainable Data Center

The Sustainable Data Center is a data center that consumes net zero energy from non-renewable sources like the public electric grid, over its entire lifecycle from initial resource extraction and manufacturing to operation and end-of-life reclamation. This data center satisfies the Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) of the hosted services, while reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and emissions. Research thrusts include IT-facility demand management, supply-side management, integrated design and management, and management information systems.