How To

Driving Efficiency: Reducing Your Datacenter Energy Footprint With the Cloud

Sustainability is top of mind for business leaders, driven by both environmental concerns and the financial aspect of resource management. Budgets are becoming tighter, harmful emissions are becoming more rampant, and consumers are becoming more mindful of which companies are taking the initiative to be environmentally friendly.

Sustainability now is nothing less than a major business imperative. For organizations looking to take the first step, reducing datacenter energy use is a great place to start.

Key Takeaways:

It’s easy to start driving sustainability by following simple industry best practices such as implementing smart technology and using energy-efficient devices.
The cloud is inseparable from modern IT, and while it presents its own sustainability challenges, cloud providers are in a great position to help everyone reduce their digital carbon footprints.
New innovations in HCI and hybrid multicloud technology are paving the way to a greener, more environmentally friendly future for the entire IT industry.

How are organizations reducing datacenter energy use today?

Implementing sustainable practices in IT is a process sometimes referred to as green computing. Organizations that practice green computing place a special focus on reducing their carbon footprint and are mindful not only of reducing energy usage but also their processes of using, disposing of, and recycling hardware.

Common green computing practices seeing widespread use in organizations today include:

Implementing smart technology that analyzes key metrics to automate energy usage
Investing in energy-efficient devices
Following eco-friendly e-waste disposal policies
Simply turning devices off when not in use

Reducing datacenter energy use remains a primary goal for many companies. To achieve this, companies are building sustainable datacenters that are scalable and efficient by design. One way to accomplish this is with HCI that densely packs many datacenter functions into a single stack and uses software emulation to replicate the capabilities of the underlying hardware. The result is a datacenter with fewer devices that runs more efficiently, requiring less energy and less long-term investment.

Organizations on the path to reducing their carbon footprints can gauge their progress with environmental, social, and corporate governance measures. IT sustainability and ESG go hand in hand, with ESG standards being a framework that directly affects business direction and investment decision making.

How can using the cloud make a notable difference?

In a time when cloud computing is solving many of the most difficult IT challenges, business leaders should be considering how much the cloud can help with reducing datacenter energy use.

Offloading datacenter functionality to a third-party vendor will certainly lower the consumer organization’s energy usage, but the computing is still happening somewhere. This raises the question of whether the cloud truly yields a net positive when it comes to lowering the carbon footprint.

The cloud industry has its own sustainability challenges to overcome. Namely, it is responsible for a sizable digital carbon footprint that grows larger for each user that turns to cloud computing. The goal of green computing in the cloud, therefore, is to make sure the digital carbon footprint is smaller than what the traditional carbon footprint would be for a similar scale of operations.

The cloud can still make a notable difference in sustainability when cloud providers are responsible about using energy-efficient hardware and optimizing their datacenter operations. The key takeaway is that reducing datacenter energy use is an easier transition for a large-scale cloud as compared to the hundreds or thousands of individual organizations they serve.

Nutanix sustainability solutions can make a significant impact for businesses looking for the right cloud platform on which to launch their green IT initiatives. Those operating in the Nutanix environment can leverage modernized infrastructure to optimize workload placement, increase efficiency with automation, and consolidate their overall footprint.

What is the future of enterprise sustainability?

The future of enterprise sustainability is closely tied with the development of green datacenters. Many organizations are already building or rebuilding their datacenters from scratch to meet emerging standards for clean energy consumption.

The sustainable datacenter of the future will also rely on the cloud and cloud-based partnerships to make optimized efficiency a reality. Cloud-powered artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize workload management, while a collective commitment to be environmentally friendly holds entire industries accountable for reducing datacenter energy use.

All of this is possible due to the widespread adoption of the hybrid multicloud operating model. Working with a true multicloud gives IT leaders the flexibility they need to innovate on sustainability projects, optimize workload placement based on energy consumption, and collaborate with external partners toward a better future.

As Nicholas Reichenbach, founder and CEO of Alkaline Flow Spring Water, puts it, “Companies should embrace sustainability as an opportunity to become more efficient, reduce waste, and identify and eliminate hidden costs. More than an obligation and just another thing you have to do, you can see it as a way to unlock shareholder value.”

In this regard, the growing importance of enterprise sustainability makes for a future where doing the morally correct thing can also be the indisputably most profitable decision.

Adopt the best platform for reducing datacenter energy use

Going green is never an easy thing to do, especially for businesses that already have an extensive operational infrastructure in place. Making positive changes is possible, though, when there are established best practices to follow and accessible cloud solutions within reach.

The Nutanix philosophy of using 100% virtualization leads to highly efficient datacenters that require 46% less power, lessening the digital carbon footprint of all organizations choosing to operate in the Nutanix environment.

While reducing datacenter energy use is highly important, it is also only one step on the IT industry’s sustainability journey. Contact us today to inquire about other Nutanix sustainability solutions.

Learn more about rethinking cloud workloads with sustainability in mind and the shift to HCI for further efficiency.

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