Gaining a Sustainable Perspective
From the archive: written before or outside the Architect Tomorrow newsletter, so it may be out of date.
Today is Earth Day, widely recognised as the largest secular observance in the world, marked by more than a billion people every year as a day of action to change behaviour and create global progress toward a sustainable future.
Managing the Environmental impact of IT endpoints
As the old saying goes - you can’t manage what you can’t measure; and this includes the environmental impact of your IT assets / architecture. Additionally IT management and security solutions can be horribly inefficient requiring lots of additional infrastructure (and therefore energy) - choosing a smart low (or zero) infrastructure platform provides compelling benefits
Its vital to properly understand what IT assets organisations have, how they are performing, and how utilised they are, allowing for data-driven, environmentally-responsible IT asset management decisions.
Decision such as:
- How to optimize IT assets - do you have hardware that is running over or under capacity?
- How to reduce the number of server endpoints or storage appliances
- How to save energy by understanding what overhead apps and services are running on your endpoints
- When to defer the replacement of end user hardware that is still fit for purpose
When organisations have complete visibility into their hardware and software assets, they can reduce or optimise their IT spend, all while improving their environmental impact. Organisations need to Do the Right Thing for the business and for a more sustainable future.
Organisations who taken a more focused approach have been able to eliminate tens, or even hundreds, of management servers when they moved to more efficient architectures. Each server eliminated translates to energy impact far beyond the datacenter.
Things like Tanium regularly help identify low- or zero-utilization endpoints (generally servers) in customer IT environments. Often referred to as “ghost” or “zombie” servers. These proliferate in environments as applications are moved around or retired, but the infrastructure is not decommissioned. These devices are consuming power (and other resources) without providing any business benefit. Typically 5%-10% of servers falling into this category at large organisations.
Leveraging more effective performance management can provide data about endpoints that are performing well (plenty of memory, storage, low CPU) and allow the customer to take those devices off a refresh list or delay refresh by a year or more, extending the life cycle of that asset, postponing purchase of a replacement and reducing e-waste.
Future possibilities
Ultimately I believe the future of work must be a sustainable one. Today, on Earth Day, hopefully these perspectives will help provide food for thought on your sustainability journey. We each have a role to play and using technology and data intelligently to inform sustainable decision making is massively important. On a personal level I am excited that this week I finally switched to a battery electric vehicle - perhaps more on that in a future update.
Do feel free to get in touch if you’d like to discuss better technology footprint visibility or other sustainable technology topics.
Originally published on LinkedIn. Comments and discussion live there.