Latin America. The findings of an Atlantic Ventures study on data center sustainability prompt CIOs to reevaluate their current cloud strategies to offset rising energy costs and the ambitious goals of NetZero, which is the state in which the company's activities do not negatively impact the environment from greenhouse gas emissions.
The report suggests that HCI (Hyperconverged Cloud Infrastructure) has to be part of the IT strategy, stating that it can lead, in some cases, to 30-40% energy savings.
"HCI architectures give customers the opportunity to combine the advantages of a truly highly automated, cloud-like IT infrastructure with the flexibility to host it in any location," says Atlantic Ventures. It is a form of digital sobriety. An infrastructure that helps organizations better focus their digital resources, reducing waste and improving overall performance and data relevance.
This is important, because as companies go through a digital transformation process, a series of steps are required. The success, or even failure, of those steps depends on the flexibility and efficiency of the underlying infrastructure. By streamlining this infrastructure, companies can typically get rid of the costly complexity of managing their own data centers. What HCI does is provide organizations with the best of all worlds, by enabling a hybrid cloud strategy, optimizing the consumption of IT resources (whether in the public or private cloud), while minimizing costs and energy consumption.
The value of an HCI, such as Nutanix, is that the IT platform is simplified and automated, so it manages itself effectively, freeing up the IT team to focus on other tasks.
A joint effort
From a sustainability perspective, every part of the cloud and data center ecosystem must deliver sustainable innovation. While a Nutanix HCI will focus on software that automatically optimizes IT resource consumption, the data center provider (co-location or public cloud provider) must come up with solutions to reduce water and energy consumption for cooling purposes.
Undoubtedly, more data centers should adopt liquid cooling, which is already proving to be a more efficient and sustainable method. Meanwhile, hardware suppliers must support sustainability measures through recycling and energy efficiency improvements. Each has an important role to play in helping customers reduce their environmental impacts and achieve their NetZero goals.
Big changes can come from the real demands of these services. While culturally at least it would be impossible to enforce or even recommend reduced use of digital devices, more can certainly be done in the way data is processed and managed.
Automation within HCI improves data processes and ensures workloads run in your most efficient cloud locations. Ultimately, it's about doing more with less, using advanced automation and technologies that can make a real difference in how data is processed, stored, accessed and used. As Gartner warns in its 10 Strategic Predictions for 2023, the proliferation of AI-powered technologies will be a major sustainability challenge. When it comes to the data center, there's never been a more pressing time to act.
Text written by Sammy Zoghlami, Senior Vice President, Nutanix EMEA.
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