Can IT reduce its environmental impact without compromising application performance or innovation?
“Here in Montpellier, we are hosting the latest infrastructure technology—IBM Z®, IBM® LinuxONE, IBM Power® and IBM Storage—which can be hybridized with cloud environments in IBM Cloud®, as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure Google Cloud Platform (GCP),” explains Gauthier Siri, Technology Engineer, IBM Client Engineering. “Our data center is used by a wide range of IBMers who are supporting clients and producing short-term workloads such as a proof-of-concept (POC), demo and various other highly customized architectures,” Siri adds.
With many users relying on Montpellier Data Center, the infrastructure team is laser-focused on assuring application performance—but this is not the team’s only strategic priority. The team is also focused on doing its part to advance IBM’s energy conservation goals.
Since the early 1990s, IBM has been committed to addressing climate change through energy conservation and climate protection programs. In 2021, IBM established a new goal to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030. Montpellier Data Center’s mission is to have the lowest environmental impact possible while also continuing to deliver exceptional service to its end-users. This is why the team is implementing the IBM Turbonomic® and IBM Instana® solutions.
“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.
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Produced in United States of America, August 2023.
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