Experts Discuss Top IT Sustainability Challenges

In this Tech Barometer podcast, four IT industry experts discuss trends and early best practices shaping IT sustainability strategies.

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Transcript:

Jason Lopez: The sound you’re hearing is in the room at a press conference on IT sustainability, which was done at .NEXT in Chicago in 2023. You’re listening to the Tech Barometer podcast. This was a gathering of journalists in a round table setting, sitting elbow to elbow with subject matter experts, Chris Kanaracus, Research Director of Cloud and Edge Services at IDC, Steve McDowell, Principal Analyst with NAND Research, Harmail Chatha, who oversees data centers at Nutanix, and Steen Dalgas, who at the time of this recording was a London-based cloud economist for Nutanix. This session wasn’t necessarily closed door, but it wasn’t being recorded, and we thought we’d step in just as it started with a Zoom recorder to capture it. It starts off with Steen talking about the focus on frequent hardware upgrades to boost business productivity. He says it’s short-sighted. Instead, he sees a major shift toward software-driven innovation, which extends the life of hardware and scales to meet growing demands and growing sustainability strategies.

Steen Dalgas: I looked at the car industry. They’re much more mature in terms of their sustainability dialogue than we are in the IT industry. So the topic there was embedded emissions, which is the emissions in the manufacturing process. This whole area in the IT industry is not being actively considered. I mean, I used to work at IBM. So you think about the business model of all the big vendors, their hardware vendors. They have this sort of strict end of life, and it’s all about trying to effectively force customers, if you want innovation, to buy new hardware. And the Nutanix approach is completely different. So we come up with the approach where actually the hardware piece is commodity, and all the innovation should come from the software layer. And that’s more sustainable by design. So what that means is every six months, our customers get new features to deliver through the software, and we make the upgrade process really simple. And actually what happens is when we deliver a new upgrade, often the hardware performance improves as a result of the software design. I personally don’t believe the numbers I’m seeing from the hardware vendors in terms of embedded emissions. They’re saying it’s like 10% of the life cycle. I don’t believe those numbers because I’ve seen other evidence that it’s actually a lot higher.

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So the embedded emissions are the emissions from manufacturing, assembly, and then shipping. And that can often happen. The assembly can be in a different country. So you’re shipping to two different countries. And if you’re talking about three-tier architecture, the server is made in one country, the storage, the networking, and they all have to be assembled together. You’ve got emissions every time you refresh.So the obvious answer is to extend out the life of hardware and deliver innovation through software. So this wasn’t a Nutanix designing this to be sustainable. This was a smarter way, because we want to get away from this forcing customers to buy new hardware every five years and actually extending out the life of hardware. And we know that the hyperscalers are going down the same route. They’re looking to extend out the life of assets up to six, seven, eight years. And I’m working hard with our internal folks. The one issue that we have in Nutanix is you’ve got to test that the software works on the hardware. So we’re actually going beyond end of life. And we can see, so the future is that hardware life will be extended out. And the hardware vendors don’t really want to hear that, but I think that’s, I think, where the industry should be going.

Steve McDowell: Yeah, so I agree with everything you said, right? And I look at it from the bottom up. Technology is intrinsically dirty. Data centers consume something like one and a half percent of the world’s energy. I saw a statistic when I was preparing for this that it generates almost 1% of the CO2 every year in modern times. We’re not going to get off that train, right? We need this technology. We just need less of it. And the way you get less of it is to optimize its usage, with cloud I’m sharing a CPU among X number of instances. With technologies like Nutanix delivers, I’m optimizing my workloads and consolidating them. And that’s a sustainability play. And it’s not a save the planet play necessarily, because industry’s motivated by profit. But there’s regulation in ...