How Companies Can Reduce Emissions by Moving Workloads 

Faced with regulatory, investor, and consumer pressure, many businesses are focusing their efforts on sustainability. This is especially true for IT since studies suggest datacenters and networks contribute to 1% of global emissions - about the same as the entire country of Mexico. Reducing emissions through carbon reduction targets have become common practice for many organizations - with IT teams playing a significant role since IT owns the data, power-intensive applications, and AI workloads running on their organization’s infrastructure.  

The Importance of Location in Carbon Emissions

Datacenters are the backbone of modern digital ecosystems and significant consumers of power. And the energy usage is not predicted to slow down - Goldman Sachs Research estimates that datacenter power demand will grow 160% by 2030.

The carbon footprint of a datacenter largely depends on the energy sources used to power it. Datacenters in regions that rely heavily on renewable energy sources, such as wind or solar, tend to have a much lower carbon footprint than those in regions that are more dependent on fossil fuels.  

In addition to geography, IT teams can take advantage of the benefits of colocations or public cloud providers with low Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and access to renewable and cleaner energy options. In some cases, extending workloads to the public cloud can significantly reduce emissions. According to Gartner, "public cloud providers can produce 70% to 90% fewer GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions than traditional server rooms, owned data centers and midsize data center facilities."¹

A potential way to achieve the desired reduction in emissions may be via the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) solution, which uses identical operations and enterprise data services across clouds so customers can easily move workloads without refactoring. As part of NCP, Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) software runs on bare-metal instances in AWS or Azure and can help extend workloads into public clouds. Moving workloads to different locations can be an effective strategy to minimize emissions. 

Taking Advantage of the Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator Tool

To help visualize how moving the same workload to different regions can impact the emissions due to the varying carbon intensities associated with geographies, Nutanix developed the Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator educational tool based on Nutanix Validated Designs.  

For example, after navigating to the tool, a user can select a generalized virtualization workload with 200VMs, and a PUE of 1.8, and select Australia as the location. The user can observe that workload uses just over 43,000 kWh and yields an estimated 29 metric tons of carbon equivalents (MTCO2e) per year.  

Taking that same workload and moving it to Belgium shows the same amount of energy results in a reduction of annual emissions to 7 MTCO2e. If we keep the same configuration and move it to the United States as a location, it produces 16MTCO2e. If we select France, where renewable energy abounds, emissions drop to 2MTCO2e. In Thailand this same workload produces an estimated 24MTCO2e, compared to running it in Portugal (7MTCO2e). In each of these examples, moving the same workload on a Nutanix solution to geographies with a lower carbon intensity could result in a more than 3X reduction in emissions.²

Moving workloads can help minimize emissions. 

Moving workloads to different locations can be an effective strategy for reducing carbon emissions - be it to a more efficient facility, cloud provider, or less carbon intensive geography. A hybrid multicloud solution not only unifies management across environments, it enables portability of workloads and has the potential to enable businesses to significantly lower their carbon footprint.

For more strategies and information about how you may be able to pursue carbon savings, download the report at nutanix.com/carbon or visit Nutanix’s sustainable solutions page: https://www.nutanix.com/solutions/sustainability-and-it.

1 Gartner Press Release, Gartner says CIOs Must Balance Environmental Promises with the Risks of AI, November 7, 2023. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

2 The Carbon and Power Estimator is intended for illustrative and educational purposes and results may vary.

Disclaimer

Since actual deployments and underlying assumptions will vary, this tool should be used only for illustrative purposes and is not suitable for financial forecasting, public disclosure, sustainability compliance purposes, or purchasing decisions. The report and the Estimator Tool results are based on in-use power consumption and do not take into account emissions associated with the life cycle of the hardware due to manufacture, packaging, shipping, reuse / circularity, emissions associated with disposal / recycling of IT equipment and other factors that can contribute to environmental impact. For more details on the Estimator Tool calculation methodology, please refer to the Methodologies and Data Sources section of the report at nutanix.com/carbon. 

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