Sustainability surge, Nutanix powers up power monitoring 

Green code

On the road to green code, these updates are hoped to improve sustainability planning with power consumption based on measurements from the hardware in use, updated in near-real time. 

Customers will be able to visualise power metrics in their Nutanix dashboard and understand energy utilisation across their environment.

According to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index, 88% of organisations agree that sustainability is a priority and many are taking active steps to implement sustainability initiatives, with the many of the most common actions centralising around modernising IT infrastructure. 

All well and good perhaps, but (the suggestion from the Nutanix research study is that) organisations often struggle with being able to accurately measure and plan their energy use – and by their extension carbon emissions –  across their IT estate. 

The modern complexity mix

Modern IT systems are complex, often involving a mix of on-site servers, co-located platforms and service provider hosting. This complexity can often make it difficult to access data and insights that would help inform consumers of IT resources of their energy and wider resource use.

“Energy efficiency metrics are increasingly important for IT infrastructure personnel looking to optimise resources and meet sustainability goals,” said Steve McDowell, chief analyst, Nand Research. “Active monitoring of power metrics is an exciting new tool for Nutanix customers struggling to achieve their environmental goals.”

Included in Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), this new functionality will help customers simplify this process by providing more detailed information on their energy usage rather than estimations based on assumptions or “typical” consumption values. 

X-Ray benchmarking 

It also builds upon recently released capabilities in Nutanix’s X-Ray benchmarking tool providing power and energy information for comparison alongside other performance metrics (CPU, Memory, IOPS, etc.) for real world scenarios. This can help customers better understand the power and energy usage for specific simulated workloads and make more informed decisions based on the best available data.

“Nutanix is helping organisations translate theoretical plans into actionable monitoring to support organisations in achieving their sustainability goals,” said Thomas Cornely, SVP, product management at Nutanix. “This new functionality will help customers visualise power metrics to better understand and plan energy utilisation across their Nutanix environment.”

With sustainability in mind, Cornely reminds us that IT practitioners strive to strike a balance of performance and efficient delivery of apps, data and compute. Technologies such as virtualisation, containers and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) consolidate workloads onto fewer physical devices, reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions compared to traditional infrastructure.

“On average, Nutanix customers that shared their experiences using the NCI solution, the HCI-based building block for the Nutanix Cloud Platform, reported over a 70% decrease in physical footprint and a 50% reduction in energy consumption versus their legacy systems. A reduction in energy consumption can lead to a lessening in carbon emissions, helping to minimise the environmental burden of an organisation’s IT systems,” notes Nutanix, in a technical statement.

The power consumption dashboard is currently under development and is the first step to providing users of the Nutanix Cloud Platform with more information and tools to better support their sustainable IT initiatives.