Announcing a new sustainability dashboard for IT Operations.
Sustainability initiatives are coming into sharp focus for enterprise organizations today. Investors and consumers indicate that sustainability is important to them — so much so that they are making purchasing and investment decisions based on company commitments to a sustainable future. Governments around the world are developing legislature requiring reduction commitments to greenhouse gas emissions and annual reporting. The fundamental question facing us is how can IT meet the needs of the business without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs?
Today we’re thrilled to announce our first step towards giving you the tools you need to operationalize sustainability: our new sustainable IT dashboard.
IBM has noted in their research that while 86% of enterprise organizations have a sustainability strategy, only 35% have acted on that plan. Many organizations report challenges with having the right tools and experience as leading factors to not achieving goals. Some IT leaders have even expressed concerns over the impact on day-to-day business operations when trying to meet reduction goals — after all, their #1 job is to ensure continuous application performance.
How can IT embed sustainability into daily operations?
What does it take to run a sustainable IT operation? We at IBM believe that to become a sustainable IT operation, leaders must first define and align sustainability goals and strategy. Next, organizations must establish an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data and systems architecture to track ongoing performance. Third, they must embed sustainability decision-making into daily, real-time IT Operations (ITOps).
IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management automates critical resourcing actions to proactively assure application performance with the most efficient use of compute, storage and network. When applications consume only what they need when they need it, you avoid wasted spend and wasted energy. With our new sustainable IT dashboard, IBM Turbonomic is giving IT teams what they need to embed sustainability into their daily operations.
Understand current data center energy use and estimated carbon emissions
With the addition of this new, sustainable IT dashboard, IT admins now have visibility into data center power and energy consumption and its estimated carbon impact:
Execute resourcing actions that reduce energy use and carbon emissions
But at its core, Turbonomic is about taking action, which is why you can also now see exactly how the Turbonomic actions you have executed have reduced energy and carbon impact without sacrificing application performance.
It also projects the energy and emissions impact of taking certain Turbonomic actions, such as suspending unused hosts (after safely consolidating workloads onto fewer hosts):
The dashboard will also compare the equivalency of your CO2e emissions in different equivalencies for reference — including acres of forest per year, number of trees growing for 10 years, number of vehicles and number of households — to give context to the emissions numbers:
Bridging IT actions with ESG goals
These new Turbonomic capabilities can further facilitate a company’s sustainability initiatives by connecting and feeding data to the IBM Envizi ESG Suite, giving them insight into how their IT decisions intersect with their sustainability goals and reporting. Envizi automates the collection and consolidation of more than 500 data types and supports major sustainability reporting frameworks. These technologies are part of IBM’s broader sustainability portfolio, which is designed to help organizations take a data-driven approach to operationalize sustainability efforts across their business.
Understand the problem and what you can do about it
When application workloads consume only what they need to perform, organizations can increase utilization to run more workloads on fewer hosts and, thereby, reduce carbon emissions. We hope that viewing the outcomes of our automation through an energy and emissions lens will inspire more IT organizations to take action and achieve continuously efficient operations.
This is just the beginning. Sustainability is not a nice-to-have, it’s an imperative. We will continue to expand our capabilities to facilitate smarter energy and emissions decisions alongside your day-to-day IT operational decisions. If you would like to learn more, the IBM Community team is conducting a webinar on December 15, 2022, that will demonstrate the dashboard in detail and answer questions.
Register for the webinar today.
Learn more about IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management.