Accelerating sustainability with IBM Turbonomic

The question most customers ask today is “How do I reduce my energy use and carbon impact, without compromising the ability to meet the day-to-day needs of the business?”

One way to quickly improve energy efficiency, reduce cost and cut down your carbon impact, is by optimizing your data center and public cloud usage.  

When we look at data centers, we see that electricity can account for as much as 70% of total data center operating costs. And we also found that typically on-prem data centers operate at only 20-40% utilization. With the rising cost of energy and the latest global agreement on UN Climate Change Conference COP28, organizations are looking for ways to become more energy-efficient (sustainable). 

Public cloud has shown that it can be more energy-efficient than European data centers. According to 451 Research, AWS for example, can be 5 times more sustainable than EMEA data centers and can lower carbon footprint by up to 80% (Source: Amazon). However, a study by Green Data Centers has shown that cloud users typically overprovision their workloads by 30- 50% in order to assure application performance.  Which leads to cloud consumption waste and excess cost. 

 
How can we support you with sustainability?  

Operationalizing sustainability in IT, when it comes to Softline’s services with IBM Turbonomic, means optimizing your use of datacenter resources, in order to become more efficient while continually balancing application performance. One of the core principles is the ability to quickly eliminate resource over-allocation, while still meeting performance requirements for your business applications. With IBM Turbonomic, we can make an immediate difference by optimizing data center resources. This not only reduces energy consumption, but also allows IT to accommodate additional workloads without the necessity of expanding its physical footprint. By reducing your data center energy use and footprint, this can help IT to show real progress in meeting the larger sustainability goals of the enterprise. 

Reducing energy use and carbon impact with automation 

So, you’ve committed to reducing your environmental impact, but face many questions as you pursue your sustainability journey. Pressure to address sustainable IT strategies while also balancing revenue, risk and driving shareholder returns, poses a real challenge. 
 
Now, you can make an immediate impact on energy use by optimizing how you allocate resources to applications. When applications consume only what they need in order to perform, you can increase utilization, reduce energy costs and carbon emissions, and achieve continuously efficient operations. Our Application Resource Management (ARM) service uses intelligent automation to help you do just that. Including a sustainable IT dashboard that provides visibility into IT infrastructure power & energy consumption and its estimated carbon impact.  

How does it work? 

The key benefit of Softline’s ARM service is that it provides IT with automated resourcing actions to safely reduce energy usage / become more sustainable. After all, when energy use is reduced, your data center reduces its carbon impact. Within our Application Resource Management service, we: 

1. Measure: we measure data center energy usage and carbon emissions within your data center, and present the results in correlation with IT infrastructure. 
2. Analyze & Plan: we evaluate the measured data and provide actions to reduce energy usage & carbon emissions through optimizing data center resources. 
3. Act: automated actions configure resources continuously to reduce energy waste and carbon emissions without risking day-to-day application performance. 
4. Report: a sustainable IT dashboard displays energy use & carbon data before and after actions are taken, and can connect to IBM Envizi to provide data for ESG compliance and reporting use, providing timely, accurate data and ensuring your data center is continuously running efficiently.  

Optimizing application resource consumption either in the datacenter, the public cloud, or in both, improves an organization's long-term energy consumption profile:  

Our customers already achieved results like this, because they understand their applications’ true resource requirements and can automate to dynamically meet them.  

Also you can realize these results! You now understand how to approach sustainable IT, and the impact this has had on other businesses. So, let’s explore the impact it can have on YOUR business!