*2.4. Data Centre Equipment Design and Manufacture*

Data centre equipment life varies according to type, and while some last for 20 years, the average life of other products such as servers ranges from under one year in hyperscale centres to 5+ years in enterprise and colocation centres. Consequently, disruption to manufacture will influence current DC operators' ability to improve service (by upgrading equipment) or extend provision (by expanding current and/or equipping new data centres). Reliance on digital technology and services has grown to a point where interruption of many current services (e.g., health, traffic control) would have very adverse social and economic impacts; examples include increased costs which will eventually be passed on to end users and limit access to the internet by the poorest populations. Uncertainty about the supply chain will also affect longer term business and service planning.

The engineering profession is comprised of many specialisms (e.g., civil, mechanical, electrical and electronic, computing, aeronautical); the 'traditional' approach is monodisciplinary, and expertise and knowledge tends to be specific and deep but narrow, and, consequently, problem solving has not been holistic in that challenges have been addressed by developing fixes for individual problems and linear thinking, rather than going back to first principles and/or adopting a whole systems approach. This approach is prevalent in the data centre industry, which is comprised of 10 internal subsectors and 1 external subsector (see Figure 1), each of which employs highly talented and skilled professionals. However, there has been very little interaction between the subsectors and, consequently, problems solved in one part of the system (subsector) have often created problems in other parts of the system, one example of which is described above, i.e., that of reducing energy consumption by increasing water use.

**Figure 1.** Data Centre Industry actors and sub-sectors, the CEDaCI project.

In summary, the data centre industry is unique: the rate and scale of growth of the technology and sector are unprecedented, as is the impact of services provided (specifically connectivity) on almost every aspect of daily life in the developed world, and influence is increasing in the developing world. To date, the sector has focused on the short term and provision of increasingly fast and extensive services, based on a linear take-makeuse-dispose economy. The fundamental design of data centre equipment has not changed since the sector began, and most disruption and innovation are associated with the services provided by the technology, rather than the technology itself. The above factors necessitate

an urgent and systemic review and change in practice across the sector to ensure that future services remain uninterrupted and that the sector becomes environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable. This could be assured through development of a sectoral Circular Economy although silo working and fragmentation currently presents considerable technical and behavioural challenges to this [21]. Section 3 will discuss CEDaCI–a project that was developed to initiate a Circular Economy for the Data Centre Industry; the methods employed to underpin this project are also described, and then, their impact is investigated, and assessed, via the quantitative and qualitative data in Section 4.
