Sustainable IT optimizes performance, reduces consumption

“As engineers we are always looking for new ways to be more efficient in energy use and reduce carbon impact in the data center,” explains Siri. The Montpellier Data Center team’s goal is to make the most efficient use of its infrastructure while also continuing to deliver reliability, performance and availability of its applications.

“We are in the early stages of our implementation journey, but we are pleased with what we are seeing so far. Presently, we use Instana to monitor demo applications,” says Siri. This helps the team more proactively detect application performance risks before they impact the customer experience.

“Turbonomic provides resourcing recommendations to help improve the health of our applications as well as the efficiency of our data center. For example, Turbonomic can show us when latency is exploding, and it recommends resourcing actions to address this,” says Siri. The team has also been piloting one of the newest capabilities released by IBM Turbonomic: the sustainable IT dashboards.

IBM Turbonomic’s sustainable IT dashboards provide visibility into power and energy consumption, as well as estimated carbon impact, for IT infrastructure and business applications. Visibility into consumption is just the first step. Turbonomic also provides AI-powered resourcing recommendations and automated actions, which IT teams can use to become more energy efficient and help assure application performance. Furthermore, Turbonomic provides a report showing the projected outcomes of taking Turbonomic actions to safely reduce energy consumption (in terms of kilowatt hours) and the estimated carbon impact (in terms of metric tons of carbon dioxide, or an equivalent such as number of households or number of tree seedlings).

Since implementing the sustainable IT dashboards, Siri and team have begun monitoring which applications and projects are the most power consuming. Given that the Montpellier Data Center is supporting many short-term workloads, it is critically important that the team can monitor fluctuating demand and energy consumption, and take corrective action to improve efficiency when necessary. “Through this new sustainable IT dashboard, we can see how our business apps are impacting our data center energy consumption and see direct actions we can take to reduce it without sacrificing application performance,” notes Siri. “We are always working to become more sustainable. There is still work to do but we are on our way. This new reporting in Turbonomic is a step forward for us.” 

Home to the IBM Client Engineering EMEA organization, IBM Montpellier Data Center offers hybrid multicloud infrastructure and deep technical expertise to help teams across IBM innovate and rapidly prove solutions to support clients’ business needs. The team’s mission is to provide speed-to-value and innovation through co-creation with clients.