On-premises or cloud data centers present many opportunities for improving sustainability. Upgrading to more energy-efficient IT infrastructure and optimizing infrastructure and computing with AI can reduce energy consumption and drive social impact.
Repurposing or recycling the decommissioned hardware can keep it out of landfills. You can significantly reduce emissions and costs by optimizing the resources consumed by your enterprise applications. Most importantly, these actions can also contribute toward a better customer experience.
Existing infrastructure and unchecked server sprawl are key contributors to high energy consumption in enterprise data centers. Replacing existing infrastructure with new, energy-efficient hardware can have a significant and immediate effect on energy consumption, while high-density servers also reduce floor space and thus lighting and cooling requirements.
To maximize sustainability, look for vendors with ethical supply chain credentials and proven recycling and refurbishment schemes for your old equipment to extend its useful life and keep it out of landfills. Environmental impact can also be reduced by choosing vendors that commit to plastic-free, recyclable packaging.
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Electricity accounts for as much as 70% of total data center operating costs.¹
The IBM® z16™ platform is built to optimize sustainability in the modern data center, with improved energy efficiency, enhancement of manufacturing and material sourcing, improved packaging strategies, and material recycling at product end of life. Architectural features that improve energy efficiency include on-chip compression and encryption designed to sustain 90% utilization.
IBM® LinuxONE is an enterprise-grade Linux® server with a unique architecture designed to meet the needs of mission-critical workloads for regulated industries. Contain server sprawl, decrease total cost of ownership (TCO) and contain your corporate carbon footprint.
Today’s applications are increasingly distributed and dynamic, and are deployed across complex hybrid and multicloud environments. Managing and optimizing application performance in this environment is highly complex, and often leads to overprovisioning to accommodate peaks in resource utilization.
As well as incurring high costs, overprovisioning also racks up energy consumption and contributes to electronic waste. Implementing an AI-powered application resource management solution can significantly cut energy consumption—not to mention cloud and infrastructure costs—by continuously monitoring and optimizing resource utilization across on-prem, cloud and hybrid environments.
IBM® Turbonomic® Application Resource Management continuously analyzes applications' resource utilization across on-premises and public cloud environments, providing intelligent resource optimization recommendations that can be enacted manually or automatically. When applications consume only what they need to perform, you can trim costs and materially reduce your carbon footprint immediately and continuously.
Footnotes
1. IT sustainability beyond the data center, IBM Institute for Business Value, 16 May 2022.