Our paper "A Case for Ecological Efficiency in Database Server Lifecycles" has been accepted at the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) 2025 in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
This collaborative effort by the Data Engineering Systems group analyzes the ecological efficiency of modern server lifecycles, offering insights into sustainable practices for data management systems.
Abstract:
Like other software systems, database systems benefit from hardware performance improvements. For the longest time, acquiring new hardware resulted in significant software efficiency gains due to exponential improvements of hardware capabilities. Physical limits in hardware manufacturing have brought former niche designs into standard components, such as multiple cores and specialized circuits. Even with these new designs, hardware improvements are decreasing, while software and applications are still becoming increasingly complex and resource demanding. Given the resource consumption of hardware manufacturing, the ideal lifecycle of hardware naturally has to extend from an efficiency aspect.
In this paper, we try to estimate efficiency of lifecycle duration of database hardware. We calculate the reduction in performance improvements of hardware using publicly available performance numbers, as well as our own benchmarks, and relate them to the specified thermal design power to get the power efficiency. Incorporating estimations on hardware and power production carbon intensity, we challenge current wisdom on hardware replacement frequencies and try to establish new rules of thumb on the ideal hardware lifecycles for database deployments. We present opportunities for future research trends.
Paper: Download
