Obsolescence as a Future Key Challenge for Data Centers

The advance of sustainable development in times of climate change, energy revolution and emerging scarcity of resources has become a new global challenge, which gives organizations the responsibility to make processes more sustainable. Obsolescence as a product aging process with complex causalities is unavoidable and, in the context of sustainability considerations, the question arises how to deal effectively with obsolescence along the entire product life cycle. Especially in the area of data center operation, a significant growth in capacity has been recorded in recent years, with organizations using cloud computing solutions to reduce space and IT equipment and to outsource them to centralized data centers, which increases the challenges for data centers in dealing with obsolescence in a sustainable manner. In cooperation with the data center Biere in Saxony-Anhalt, an as-is state regarding the management of obsolescence has been recorded. It was found that obsolescence management approaches are already being implemented in operational data centers. However, there is still potential for optimization regarding sustainable development when dealing with obsolescence, especially in procurement processes, in product life cycle management, and in cooperation with hardware vendors and service providers.