Empowering Sustainability with a Modernized Infrastructure
By Andrea Osika, PMM, Sustainability,
Mat Brown, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, Sustainability
Sustainability is a rising priority.
Efficiency isn’t a new concept in the world of information technology (IT), where teams have consistently strived to maximize output within existing resource constraints. However, with the International Energy Agency (IEA) declaring an energy crisis and the introduction of new policies and legislation focused on climate change, efficiencies focused on mitigating environmental impact are being added to the list. It’s not enough for organizations to simply run the latest applications, like AI, ML, Kubernetes and big data, or safeguard systems against the latest cyber threats while keeping costs in check. Now, organizations must pursue these goals while also aligning with their sustainability objectives.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure helps minimize energy consumption.
There are many ways to drive efficiency in IT systems. Technologies like virtualization and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) help to minimize energy consumption. While virtualization is fairly standard practice in enterprise IT today, HCI takes virtualization a step further by consolidating compute, storage and networking into a scale-out software-defined solution. This consolidation of resources can minimize physical footprint, and also holds the potential to decrease embodied emissions and deliver energy savings.
Nutanix pioneered HCI and delivers sustainable efficiencies through its Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) solution, the HCI-based building block for the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) system. NCI not only consolidates resources and simplifies planning for current needs, but it also enables seamless scaling as requirements evolve. This is achieved by using software intelligence to optimize resources, and deliver incremental, predictable scaling for future capacity and performance requirements.
A visual representation of the simplification that can be achieved as a result of a move from legacy 3 tier solutions to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI).
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) customers reported a 70% decrease in physical footprint and a 50% reduction in energy consumption.
On average, customers that shared their experiences using the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) solution reported over a 70% decrease in physical footprint and a 50% reduction in energy consumption versus their legacy systems.* A reduction in energy consumption can lead to a lessening in carbon emissions, helping to minimize the environmental burden of an organization's IT systems. Some cases, like this UK investment management company, illustrate how they successfully consolidated their physical footprint by approximately 75%, and highlights how NCI can lead to tangible benefits in terms of operational costs and environmental impact.
The efficiency savings potential from implementing NCI can vary based on several factors. It’s important to consider factors such as the age of the legacy solution and capacity utilization, as they can significantly impact actual savings. Additionally, factors like compute, storage and IO requirements, along with security, data protection and resiliency policies, can influence realized energy savings. As aging infrastructure progresses, efficiency savings typically increase when replacing legacy solutions with infrastructure like NCI.
Location, Location, Location
If carbon emissions reductions are a priority for you, it’s essential to consider not only embodied carbon but also location. The efficiency of a data center facility in delivering power to IT equipment and the type of energy it uses, whether its low carbon vs. non-renewable, can significantly impact the environmental footprint of your IT systems. To help better understand this point, Nutanix has developed the Carbon and Power Estimator that helps IT practitioners better understand how different factors can influence their carbon emissions. Because the carbon intensity of a grid and the efficiency of a data center can vary significantly, adaptability, application mobility and simplicity of scaling will likely increase in importance if carbon efficiency is a key business requirement.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure.
As indicated in the 2024 Enterprise Cloud Index, 98% of respondents shared that their organizations support sustainability initiatives of some sort. Moreover, there’s focus on being more data driven in terms of their approach to sustainability. IT teams actively strive for these insights and ways to leverage technology to help guide their sustainability strategies, all while ensuring secure delivery of apps, data and networking to achieve business objectives.
IT teams have used tools like the Nutanix X-Ray assessment solution to benchmark performance across IT infrastructure platforms. Nutanix X-Ray uses open-source-based software to simulate real-world scenarios, including hardware failures, to offer a more comprehensive view of system performance and resilience. Recently enhanced features within the tool now provide power and energy information for comparison alongside other performance metrics (IOPS, Latency, Throughput, CPU etc.). This helps customers better understand the power and energy usage for specific “real-world” modeled workloads and to make informed decisions backed by data.
Power metrics and energy usage data based on use cases play a crucial role in shaping sustainability strategies. NCI, and by extension NCM, provide increased visibility across IT Infrastructure and clouds, facilitating better management of resources and smarter workload placement. In turn, this further improves IT teams ability to achieve their sustainability goals.
The Nutanix Prism management console within NCI helps customers understand their infrastructure environment including storage, compute, and networking resources. Whether viewing at a complete cluster level or down to individual virtual machines (VMs), Prism offers valuable visibility and workload analysis. Nutanix customers will soon gain additional insights into power and energy usage at the node and cluster level, complementing existing metrics, like CPU utilization, memory usage and storage IOPS. These insights can provide a holistic understanding of an organization's carbon footprint and pave the way for optimizing energy efficiency and workload placement.
Energy efficiency is the path forward
Modern infrastructure can not only enhance the efficiency and sustainability of IT systems, but can also enable customers to keep up with the demands of securely and effectively achieving business objectives. Power and footprint insights can help customers make better, data driven decisions on how to optimally use their current and future resources. With these new capabilities within Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), the efficiency insights they provide can help customers gain a deeper understanding of their digital footprint and enhance outcomes over time.
Visit this technical blog, or our Sustainable IT Solutions to learn more.
*These space or energy savings claims are average results based on case studies of over 50 representative Nutanix customers. Such case studies are publicly available on the Nutanix website. Because potential customer outcomes depend on a variety of factors including their use case, individual requirements, and operating environments, these accounts should not be construed to be a promise or obligation to deliver specific outcomes. We invite you to contact Nutanix here to discuss how we may be able to provide an optimal solution for your specific circumstances.
About Nutanix
Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software, offering organizations a single platform for running apps and data across clouds. With Nutanix, companies can reduce complexity and simplify operations, freeing them to focus on their business outcomes. Building on its legacy as the pioneer of hyperconverged infrastructure, Nutanix is trusted by companies worldwide to power hybrid multicloud environments consistently, simply, and cost-effectively. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on social media @nutanix.
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