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Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator Helps Organizations Unmask Environmental Blind Spots

August 17, 2023 | min

According to the 5th Annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI), for 92% of IT decision makers sustainability is more important today than it was a year ago — a development driven by an increasing number of pending and imposed regulations globally that add to the heightened interest in this space.

As sustainability comes into view for many enterprises, they seek strategies to reduce their environmental impact. One of the first facets of the business that leaders evaluate when looking to minimize environmental impact is IT, where changes in equipment or practices have the potential to make significant impacts when it comes to energy consumption and emissions.

Introducing Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator

Today, we are excited to unveil the Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator, a new tool to help organizations understand how different factors can influence their environmental footprint by estimating annual power and emissions for various Nutanix solutions using Nutanix Validated Designs.

The Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator provides users with a report that helps illustrate how infrastructure choices can impact an environmental footprint with regard to power and emissions, with insights for developing more sustainable IT strategies. Based on user inputs regarding workloads, the efficiency of the data center, and location, an organization can conceptualize how IT choices can help them meet their sustainability goals.

Understanding what drives carbon and power consumption is an important first step for many enterprises looking to advance on their sustainability journey. The Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator can help enterprises take initiative by educating organizations on factors that can influence their environmental impact.

Below we highlight a few examples of the Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator in action:

1. Estimating the effects of different factors on power and emissions for Nutanix solutions 

As an example, a user of the Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator could see that if an organization deploys Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for a general virtualization use case with 300 virtual machines (VMs) in a U.K. data center, and with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 2.0, it is estimated to generate 14 metric tons of carbon dioxide (MTCO2) annually. If, on the other hand, the organization was able to find a way to bring the data center’s PUE down to 1.5, this change in PUE would reduce the emissions estimate by 4 MTCO2 to 10 MTCO2.

2. Accounting for geography, which can also play a major factor in sustainability

The Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator demonstrates the impact of moving workloads to geographies that leverage low carbon sources for energy generation compared to fossil fuels, which have a higher carbon intensity. For example, if the same general virtualization use case described above, with the reduced PUE of 1.5, were moved to a data center in Sweden, then the estimated carbon emissions would reduce from 10 MTCO2 to a value that is below or outside of measurable limits. This is because Sweden leverages a relatively high share of low carbon energy sources to power their grids. The Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator makes clear that migrating workloads can be a viable part of an organization's sustainability strategy. 

3. Comparing power consumption of Nutanix’s hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and 3-Tier (SAN-based) infrastructure

Users can download a report that highlights how eliminating proprietary SAN components can help reduce power consumption. Based on a third-party reviewed methodology, Nutanix HCI demonstrated significant power savings compared to 3-Tier solution with the ability to run a similar workload. For example, for a modestly-sized environment of around 300 VMs, Nutanix HCI is estimated to use around 50% less than an equivalent 3-Tier solution. Exact savings are influenced by VM compute, storage, performance, and hardware requirements.

Because every customer configuration is unique, the tool provides typical estimates that are generalized to help customers develop sustainability strategies rather than to provide exact usage figures.

Build a sustainable IT strategy with Nutanix

“Gartner® expects that by 2025, 50% of CIOs will have performance metrics tied to the sustainability of the IT organization.” 

Nutanix software and solutions can help organizations meet power and carbon goals by optimizing IT infrastructure through reduced footprint, on-demand resource scaling, and fast and easy workload movement between on-prem and cloud options.

Simon Sowerby, Technical Services Coordinator, City of Unley shared: “Our previous three-tier system consisted of about ten racks of compute equipment, and we have been able to reduce that to a quarter rack. Our power expenses have come down about 70%, which is working out to tens of thousands of dollars - and 24,000kg of CO2 emissions - saved per year.” For more details, read the case study here.

For more ideas on how to improve sustainability in your IT infrastructure, contact us or please visit:

Try the Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator

Are you ready to see for yourself? Explore the Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator here! Begin by selecting a solution and work your way through the estimator to receive a report on the approximate power consumption and emissions while in use.

The models and methodology in the Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator have been reviewed by a third party which provided assurance that the methodologies we used and the assumptions we made conform with best practices and standard GHG emissions calculation methodologies. The estimates are based on four Nutanix Validated Designs.

1 Gartner Press Releases , “Are You Thinking Too Small About Sustainable Technology?”, September 27, 2022 https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/are-you-thinking-too-small-about-sustainable-technology GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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