IT teams are tasked with improving energy efficiency and reducing their overall carbon footprint and waste in data centers—on-premises or in the cloud.  IT operators often face challenges to know just how much energy IT applications use or which ones are generating more carbon emissions in order to target the biggest offenders and make the appropriate updates.

IBM Turbonomic is excited to launch the next phase in our commitment to provide automation tools designed to help customers understand energy use and carbon emissions of their data centers and help them to become more efficient. Turbonomic now tracks the energy consumption and carbon footprint of on-prem hosts and virtual machines (VMs) to help you put your sustainability goals into action.

With the latest release (version 8.9.2), Turbonomic offers new energy and carbon emission reports to help IT teams identify and reduce energy consumption and associated CO2 emissions of data centers by optimizing IT resources, while ensuring that applications perform optimally.

With this release (along with the recent release of the Turbonomic integration with IBM Envizi ESG Suite), IT teams now have simplified tools to help optimize energy use in data centers and show the potential results of carbon reduction when action is taken.

The core functionality of version 8.9.2, along with visibility into energy use and carbon emission data, is helpful with setting and achieving sustainability goals. To visualize this data, Turbonomic provides the following features.

Sustainability charts

Turbonomic monitors the energy consumption and carbon footprint of your IT infrastructure and then displays relevant data in charts. Currently, these capabilities are supported for hosts and VMs discovered via vCenter, UCS Manager and HPE OneView targets. When you set the scope to any of these hosts and VMs and then click the Details tab, you can view sustainability data in the Energy and Carbon Footprint charts.

Energy consumption

Turbonomic collects energy-related data from hosts and VMs at 10-minute intervals. For VMs, the collected host data is used to calculate energy consumption. Currently, Turbonomic collects data via vCenter, UCS Manager and HPE OneView targets. When you set the scope to one or several hosts or VM discovered from these targets, the data that Turbonomic collected or calculated displays in the Energy consumption. The chart shows average and peak/low values over time. Use the selector at the bottom left section of the chart to change the time frame.

Carbon footprint chart

Carbon footprint represents carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions for a given virtual machine (VM). Turbonomic measures carbon footprint in grams.

Turbonomic collects energy-related data from hosts and VMs at 10-minute intervals, and then uses that data to calculate carbon footprint. Currently, Turbonomic collects data via vCenter, UCS Manager and HPE OneView targets. When you set the scope to one or several hosts or VMs discovered from these targets, the data that Turbonomic calculated displays in the Carbon Footprint chart. The chart shows average and peak/low values over time. Use the selector at the bottom left section of the chart to change the time frame.

Turbonomic’s calculation for carbon footprint includes actual data center usage and geography-influenced factors. The calculation IBM Turbonomic uses for carbon footprint can be found within the Turbonomic product documentation. You can create data center policies to adjust the calculations according to the requirements of your data centers. For example, a data center in a particular location might have different requirements than data centers in other locations. After you adjust the calculations based on your specific policies, Turbonomic can accurately report your organization’s carbon footprint.

Energy consumption dashboards in embedded reporting

If you have enabled the Embedded Reporting add-on, add the sustainability dashboards to gain insight into how you can reduce your energy consumption and associated carbon footprint.

Dashboard for sustainability: Private cloud

This dashboard focuses on the energy consumption and carbon footprint of hosts. Most importantly, Turbonomic also shows opportunities to reduce consumption and carbon footprint by executing Turbonomic actions through automation:

Application carbon footprint: Private cloud

This dashboard focuses on the energy consumption and carbon footprint of VMs. The Top Applications by Carbon Footprint view provides insight into the carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions of the VMs that power your applications. The dashboard also shows opportunities to reclaim resources by executing VM resize actions and optimization opportunities that can help reduce energy consumption and associated carbon footprint further:

With this data, IT teams can better understand which applications are the biggest energy users and carbon emitters make more informed decisions, such as redesigning the application to be more energy efficient or moving it to a more energy-efficient location or one that is supported by renewable energy.

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We are already seeing positive internal feedback with these new tools. As said by Gauthier Siri, Technology Engineer, IBM Client Engineering in our IBM Montpellier data center: “As engineers, we are always looking for new ways to be more efficient in energy use and reduce carbon impact in our data centers. With these new Turbonomic tools, we can see how our business apps are impacting our data centers to take direct actions to reduce it. We are working to become more sustainable; there is work to do but we are on our way.”  

IBM Turbonomic complements IBM’s existing portfolio of sustainability solutions and consulting expertise—including the IBM Envizi ESG Suite, IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator, IBM Planning Analytics and IBM LinuxONE—that help organizations set, operationalize and achieve their ESG goals.

With these new tools included in the IBM Turbonomic platform, customers can leverage the added value Turbonomic can bring to the organization.