How To Make Your Multicloud Strategy Sustainable
By Walter Ferreira, Senior Presales Lead
With growing pressure on organisations to meet regulatory requirements on carbon emissions and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) strategies increasingly weighted towards fighting climate change, it is inevitable that IT investment has come in for much greater scrutiny. The good news is that vendors and IT service providers are also purpose-driven and working hard to make their products and services more sustainable.
There is a broad understanding that going to the cloud will accelerate progress to net-zero, that higher virtualisation ratios are more energy efficient and that big cloud providers have the scale and influence to make a significant contribution to combating climate change. Exactly how, as VMware demonstrates, is in the way they layer sustainability into many parts of their propositions.
Making private clouds more efficient
VMware is a great enabler for multicloud strategies, not just to make them operationally manageable and cost effective, but to make them sustainable. A lot of it is about consolidation, leveraging a new wave of software-defined solutions to reduce the hardware requirement and therefore the energy consumption.
With VMware Cloud Foundation, it is building on the consolidation benefits of compute virtualisation with software-defined data centres. Implementing a consistent infrastructure and operations framework across public and private clouds enhances agility and flexibility, enabling organizations to adapt to changing business requirements while improving operational efficiency. Virtualised storage and networking are wrapped in a management layer to unlock efficiencies in private clouds, where the outcome is a significantly reduced energy and carbon footprint.
An advantage of private clouds is that you retain full control over them, unlike public clouds, which means they can play a more active role in achieving sustainability goals. The control layer in Cloud Foundation is used to improve virtual machine density through better management and rightsizing, while software segmentation allows you to reduce clusters with low utilisation, saving energy as well as increasing operational efficiency.
Managing multicloud environments
Another cloud management product, is vRealize Operations, which helps IT teams optimise, plan and scale hybrid cloud and hyper-converged infrastructure deployments. With a unified multicloud monitoring platform, it delivers continuous performance optimisation and efficient capacity management, resulting in less energy consumption and carbon emissions.
vRealize Operations uses real-time predictive analytics to automatically balance workloads and continuously optimise hyperconverged infrastructure, software-defined data centres and hybrid cloud environments. Part of this is achieved by identifying and eliminating ‘zombies’, forgotten compute assets such as virtual machines (VM), data storage and physical servers that are no longer useful but might still be consuming power. In addition to its comprehensive suite of features, vRealize Operations provides valuable insights into power consumption metrics, empowering organizations to optimize their energy usage and reduce operational costs.
If on-demand is what you are looking for to avoid having spare capacity running on-premise, and to be able to scale up and down rapidly, then VMware Cloud on AWS may be the answer. This platform offers all the benefits of VMware Cloud Foundation as offered before, but helps reduce carbon footprint by providing this solution down to a minimum of 2 hosts, allowing you to scale as required.
It also is a great use case to avoid the environmental impact of setting up a new datacentre in a remote location, where you can literally spin up a VMware Cloud on AWS environment in these AWS global datacentre regions without datacentre infrastructure, physical building space, etc. This is not only smart business, but also very sustainable.
Consolidating infrastructure components
Integrating different infrastructure onto a single platform is another way to drive operational efficiency and sustainability. VMware’s vSAN is virtualization software that combines compute and storage functions, an exercise in consolidation that reduces the hardware requirement and makes it easier to right-size implementations. By using more energy efficient and higher performing devices, it ticks two boxes, optimising storage while reducing carbon footprints.
Even the vendor’s business continuity solution allows organisations to align IT strategies with net-zero plans. VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (DR) is an easy-to-use, on-demand method of DR, a Software-as-a-Service solution that allows organisations to respond instantly to threats like ransomware. Run out of AWS data centres with their energy-efficient cooling and server infrastructure, it will also mean lower carbon operations than an on-premise approach.
With pressure on organisations to demonstrate sustainability throughout their supply chain, VMware makes a good partner. Committed to achieving net zero carbon for its operations and supply chain by 2030, the company already sources 100% of electricity in its global facilities from renewable sources. All of this matters for businesses looking to demonstrate carbon footprint reduction, particularly with Scope 3 reporting which includes indirect emissions that occur in their supply chain but are outside their direct control.
We at Ergo have a team of specialists who can address all your questions regarding the services and provide you support you on your multicloud strategy. To contact us, fill in the form below and we’ll be happy to help!
