E$G: Capacity planning for carbon & cost reduction
For companies with large IT environments, failure to reduce electricity consumption doesn’t just cost you money, it also compromises your environmental & social governance (ESG) goals.
In these difficult financial times, with recession likely and revenues under pressure, your company wants to manage their costs more tightly. At the same time, investors are also demanding that you improve ESG activities, and especially reduce your consumption of electricity and reduce your carbon footprint.
However, companies with large IT estates have a particular challenge. Computers and related hardware use large quantities of electricity, both directly to power them, and indirectly to keep the data centre cool. Data centres account for 3% of all electricity used, and in the USA, data centres used an estimated 140-billion-kilowatt hours (KwH) in 2020.
The cost of electricity has increased exponentially over the last few months, doubling or tripling in many countries. This is putting pressure on financials. Yet, most companies think there little they can do.
Room for improvement
They are wrong. Within these large data centres and cloud estates, there is plenty of opportunity for improvement. Most IT estates have 20% more capacity than they use, and therefore buy 20% more electricity than they need to. In the cloud, the problem is even worse: Most companies are paying 30% or more than they need to.
The problem is in identifying the waste and reducing it without impacting the performance of their digital business systems. Companies like VMWare have helped by moving fixed servers into virtualised clusters.
This has helped reduce the waste, but the VMs they are running are often oversized and therefore consume more power than they need for the workload. Finding this oversizing is hard without the right data collection and tooling.
ITRS Capacity Planner
This is where capacity planning software comes in. The ITRS Capacity Planner (CP) collects the data from your monitoring tools and other sources to build a detailed timeseries model. From this, CP offers recommendations of improvements to your on-premises or your public cloud IT estate.
With public cloud, CP analyses how you are buying the service and optimises that too (BTW, the tools provided by the cloud providers are usually sub-optimal!) This takes you from oversized to right-sized safely, maximising your carbon footprint reduction. The tool lets you look at different improvements you may want to make, and you can identify the greatest savings in megawatt hours (MwH) or metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e). And helps lower the amount you spend on electricity, licenses, people and HVAC.
Capacity Planner will help support your company’s drive to a better ESG carbon footprint and a cheaper and more sustainable future.
To learn more about how ITRS can help you achieve your ESG goals, click below.
