Connected Social Media

Have you ever texted with a colleague from a different generation, only to receive an icy reply? Or perhaps an overzealous reply rife with emojis? With five generations represented in the modern-day workforce, this probably sounds familiar.

Texting etiquette is just one, albeit very visible, example of the different expectations, experiences and needs of the intergenerational workforce. In this Business Group on Health podcast we speak with Dr. Megan Gerhardt, Professor of Management and Leadership at the Farmer School of Business at Miami University and the author of Gentelligence: A Revolutionary Approach to Leading an Intergenerational Workforce. In our discussion, Dr. Gerhardt shares ways to build trust amongst employees of all ages and create a culture and health and well-being benefits portfolio that acknowledges and supports the needs of employees at all life stages.

Guest: Dr. Megan Gerhardt | Professor of Management and Leadership at the Farmer School of Business at Miami University |Author of Gentelligence: A Revolutionary Approach to Leading an Intergenerational Workforce

Thank you to the episode sponsor Color Health.

In this Tech Barometer podcast, Red Hat’s Bev Gunn and Richard Harmon take listeners into the collaborative world of open source software and explain why it can lead to responsible AI.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Transcript (AI generated):

Richard Harmon: The fundamental principle that’s first is around a global community trying to innovate. So it’s not a single firm, but the global community collaborating. You have people with very different backgrounds, different experiences that are heavily driving innovation overall, and much of the innovation is coming from the open source world.

Bev Gunn: We have strong partnerships with Intel, a lot of the hardware manufacturers as well from the IBM systems groups to NetApp and Dell and HP, and all of the main hardware firms, plus the APIs and chip organizations. So again, just in terms of how open source and our technologies can actually enhance what they’re doing, aligned to what Richard has said is very key to moving forward.

[Related: Can Open Source Software Help Resolve AI Trust Issues?]

Jason Lopez: This is the Tech Barometer podcast. I’m Jason Lopez on today’s edition of Tech Barometer, a look at open Source. Open Source was in the headlines quite a bit during the.com boom. And rather than develop things in the seclusion of their organizations, the idea was to collaborate across company boundaries. This model has evolved over the past two decades. There’s still a bit of controversy over it versus building software in proprietary ways, but open source proponents like the speakers you’re about to hear from Red Hat, see open source as a crucial factor in developing AI in a responsible way In this era of virtualization, hybrid multi-cloud ai, edge quantum computing, it has a vital role to enable new capabilities and engineering business and governance.

[Relate: Open Source Software Powering Business Application Boom]

Richard Harmon: The open source community also has, in some cases, it’s not always profit focused. It’s about building something that’s completely new or different. It’s also about making it accessible to the global community.

Jason Lopez: Richard Harmon is the vice president for the Global Financial Services Industry at Red Hat.

Richard Harmon: But I think, for example, AI governance, there’s a lot of effort about how to evaluate the accuracy of whatever algo that you want to utilize. It’s important not to have black boxes so you can explain what the model is doing, why is it doing and what the answers are. It’s also making sure that things are done in a fair way so that you can monitor that. There’s no bias in other things that could come from the data, come from the algo, come from all different sources.

Jason Lopez: Harmon adds that the ability to audit as well as the security and privacy of applications for consumers, businesses, and governments, is paramount. This is where open source plays a role in accountability, such as in AI responsibility.

Richard Harmon: And I think that that’s something we see with many, many of the projects, the AI based projects in the open source space. Now, I’m not saying if you go into a project that’s done by a single firm, they would also require to instill those principles, but there’s also in many cases, a profit motive behind it. So sometimes when it has a wider open source view, you have people in the community that really focus on these types of things that make AI responsible versus just making AI work.

[Relate: The Race to Hybrid Multicloud Interoperability]

Jason Lopez: Companies like Red Hat provide open source tools that enable developers to innovate across various platforms while ensuring code security and privacy, including practices like confidential computing. We

Richard Harmon: Allow developers to build and innovate on any platform they want to run on basically. So it’s that kind of enablement.

Bev Gunn: It allows those developers with different skill sets, with different experiences and backgrounds and what have you to help to contribute around new technologies linked into AI.

Jason Lopez: Bev Gunn, who works in Red Hat’s global financial services, refers to what’s happening with the rise of AI in terms of speed and momentum. It’s a matter of how to develop and deploy technology smarter, quicker, and doing more with less.

Bev Gunn: In the old days, there was a certain way and methodology of working and partnering and what have you now, I said every day of the week where we have organizations who want to be part of that cultural movements of open source, of transparency, of contribution.

Jason Lopez: Open source tools like Python make advanced algorithms accessible through freely available libraries and development tools. As Richard points out, these are provided not just by Red Hat, but other companies in the space.

[Relate: IT Leaders Get AI-Ready and Go]

Richard Harmon: And eventually we’re going to have more and more of things like generative AI that will actually make learning of how to code much easier and quicker and make things much more efficient. But I think the secret, which you hit on precisely, is that this ability of democratizing access, and I think that’s the most compelling part about open source, is that it’s accessible to anyone. And I think that also is a lot about the culture of Red Hat and the culture of any company that’s in open source. It’s really a culture of sharing. It’s a culture of openness and transparency, but it’s also a culture of trying to strive to really build something and develop something that people can use and benefit from.

Jason Lopez: There’s a role for open source AI and transforming enterprise operations within the hybrid cloud environment. It allows for experimentation and it benefits from improving hardware performance, especially in automation, which is foundational to AI and makes processes smarter and more efficient.

Richard Harmon: I’ll give one example Swift right? It’s the global payment system. It’s owned by more than 11,000 banks globally, and it is really largely the global international payment rails for almost all countries. And what Swift has done is they’ve taken an open source approach, and they’re focused on building out sort of the next generation of AI platform with particular focus on trying to build out what they call financial transaction intelligence at scale. And their initial focus has been in financial crime. They’re building out a high performance AI environment, leveraging the unique data set they have, which is pretty much a very, very large percentage of all transactions around the world. That’s unique. No individual institution, or bank commercial provider has that kind of data set. They’re in a unique position to potentially build tools that the 11,000 plus members can utilize to help address financial crime aspects.

[Related: Birth of a Hypervisor That Unleashed the Hybrid Multicloud Era]

Jason Lopez: This is where AI is being enabled to allow Swift to securely innovate and information and insights can be shared with other institutions, which can build whatever models they want.

Bev Gunn: And so banks had to become very innovative in terms of the service offerings they had and have today because a lot of the new and neo banks or digital banks are spinning up with a lot of innovation. A lot of our banks are now offering almost concierge services with different capabilities and innovations. And so how do you differentiate yourself in the market, but stay ahead of the competition by still being profitable? Coming up with the example that Richard gave in one of the big banks, saving costs is going to be imperative because those costs can then be diverted and redistributed to create more innovation and more differentiated services to your customers and to the public.

[Relate: IT Team Modifies Open Source NetBox to Help Manage Hybrid Multicloud]

Jason Lopez: When we began this story, one of the facets of open source was about its effect on creating responsible ai. Open source is an enabler of transparency. It helps to maintain flexibility, allowing organizations to switch platforms. The approach enhances resiliency by mitigating risks associated with over-reliance on a single provider.

Richard Harmon: Yeah, I mean, in Europe we have the DORA, the Digital Operation Resiliency Act, and it’s around mission-critical applications, but it’s around third-party dependencies for, it’s mostly in financial service for banks. In this case DORA was the first time that the cloud providers are included in this because they are a critical third-party platform. And so the regulators are concerned that there is a concentration risk about that, and at the same time, they want to ensure that firms are doing the right things to ensure that they have an exit strategy. At Red Hat, we like to talk about portability, about moving across, basically running your application anywhere on a hybrid multi-cloud environment. But it doesn’t mean that you have to run on many clouds. It means if you’re running in one cloud and you need to demonstrate that you can run an application like core banking or payments or something in another cloud, you can demonstrate that, but it doesn’t mean you have to be running in many, many clouds. It’s the ability that allows you to avoid that lock-in effect,

Jason Lopez: Regulators aren’t just concerned about one bank, but about the entire system of banks. It’s one thing for one bank to go down, but the platform issue it’s entirely another. When you’re talking about five or six major banks,

Richard Harmon: The analogy I always make is if you look at Lehman Brothers, Lehman Brothers went down, the problem is no one knew who else was impacted, and there’s spillover effects. And so we had the commercial paper market crash. We had financial a disaster that many, many governments had to bail out the financial system to put it back into a stable environment. And it’s that kind of systemic risk that regulators are really, really worried about. So obviously they don’t want any individual bank to get into trouble or have big issues, but their big picture is the overall financial system.

[Related: Unlocking Benefits of Hybrid Multicloud IT Automation]

Jason Lopez: Today, there are millions of open source projects which reflect contributions from a diverse global community, including government, corporate sectors, academia, and students. In the last decade, global adoption of open source has significantly increased, and Red Hat has played a major role as a leading open source company.

Richard Harmon: It’s a global community from government entities, corporate, academics, and students of all walks of life that in some cases contribute to these projects. So it’s typically projects people are passionate about. Obviously at Red Hat, we have a lot of very passionate engineers, but it’s also very focused on addressing challenges that various industries have, society has. So it’s not just about building a piece of software, it’s typically about trying to make something. And even when you get into, for example, climate, there’s a project called OS Climate. I’m on the governing board of it, and Red Hat is a major participant with many other institutions, but that’s an example of a good number of institutions getting together to try to help the wider industry efforts and make things like data and analytics available to anyone who wants to access it.

Bev Gunn: And just on that collaborative piece, when we think about what we’re doing with Microsoft and AWS around managed OpenShift that’s taken place over the last five years because they’ve understood as well from an open source perspective, the strength of open source capabilities, even though they’re contributors to community as well, but actually building out managed service offerings within their own organizations with our technologies is kudos to the value that they see that this brings to the markets and to their own customers and prospects. So feeding of what Richard said and then looping in some of that activity definitely showcases that collaboration piece in the market with some of the big cloud providers, which there’s a lot.

Jason Lopez: Bev Gunn is an executive in Red Hat’s Global Financial Services. Richard Harmon is the Vice President for Global Financial Services Industry at Red Hat. This is the Tech Barometer podcast. I’m Jason Lopez. Thanks for listening. For more stories and more insights into technology and the people in tech, check out the forecast which produces this podcast. You can find the forecast at the forecast by nutanix.com.

Intel Factory Pathfinder delivers advanced simulation/scheduling capabilities for manufacturing.

How efficiently is your factory operating? Are you able to provide accurate delivery dates to customers and consistently meet those dates? Are you maximizing the utilization of your equipment and raw materials to keep your factory running optimally and cost effectively?

If not, Intel Factory Pathfinder was developed just for you. Factory Pathfinder can help you quickly identify and eliminate bottlenecks and constraints in your factory and equipment before they happen.

Every year, the American Cancer Society publishes Cancer Facts & Figures, an annual report that shares where we are in the collective fight against cancer. Led by Dr. William Dahut, Chief Scientific Officer at the American Cancer Society, the 2024 report reveals the good news, like the reduction in overall cancer mortality; alongside some bad news, that a record two million people will be diagnosed with cancer this year.

In this Business Group on Health podcast, Dr. Dahut explains these key findings and more, including why cancer outcomes are improving, more effective approaches to screening, how artificial intelligence can help diagnose cancer sooner, and why these insights are so important for employers and employees alike.

Guest: William L. Dahut, MD, Chief Scientific Officer, American Cancer Society

Thank you to the episode sponsor Color Health.

Workplace well-being can only be achieved when the entire team – from leadership to specialists and everyone in between – works collaboratively with trust and commitment towards shared goals.

In this episode of the Business Group on Health podcast, we speak with Tim Cunningham, Interim Executive Director of Clowns Without Borders and former Co-Chief Well-being Officer at Emory Healthcare. Tim’s professional experience took him from clown to nurse to health care executive, and in this podcast he shares how his unique background informed his current focus on workplace well-being. Tim shares how leaders, including Chief Well-being Officers, can drive the cultural changes that impact employee well-being and professional fulfillment, ultimately improving outcomes.

Guest: Tim Cunningham | DrPH, Interim Executive Director, Clowns Without Borders USA

With the surge in the growth and adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) tools, Intel has seen hundreds of employees and teams begin using and developing tools based on commercial large language models (LLMs).

Recognizing the immense potential of these tools to enhance efficiency and innovation—as well as concerns around AI data security, ethical use, and accuracy of responses—Intel IT formed a working group to understand common usage patterns, coordinate knowledge sharing across teams, and establish guidelines for safe usage.

This proactive approach led to the development of a new platform, aimed at democratizing Intel’s use of GenAI by empowering employees at all levels of technical skill to use these tools to improve their day-to-day productivity and unlock new efficiencies in Intel’s business processes.

Our initiative is designed to facilitate the use of GenAI without the need to repeatedly rebuild common components, thereby reducing security risks and speeding time to value. The rapid deployment of this platform has already demonstrated tangible value. Although the platform is currently in pilot, early users have reported notable increases in productivity. We estimate that approximately 75% of Intel employees will eventually use the GenAI platform.”

Following 50 years of steady decline, cardiovascular mortality rates began to plateau in the past decade. Alarmingly, this plateau recently became an uptick, which many believe is due in part to cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic (CKM) syndrome – a disease that 90% of adults meet criteria for but many may not have heard of.

In this episode of the Business Group on Health podcast, we talk with Dr. Chiadi Ndumele, board-certified cardiologist and lead author of the Presidential Advisory Report on Cardiovascular-Kidney-Metabolic Health. Dr. Ndumele educates us on CKM syndrome, the overlap of obesity, diabetes, chronic kidney disease and the cardiovascular system, as well as the need for increased awareness. He also shares ways to identify and treat genetic, social and environmental risk factors, and why education and understanding this condition is critical for patients of all ages.

More Information:

PREVENT Online Calculator:

Guest: Dr. Chiadi Ndumele, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Cardiologist, Johns Hopkins University

A February 2024 research review in JAMA Psychiatry identified perinatal mental health and substance use disorders, namely suicide and opioid overdoses, as the cause of nearly one in four maternal deaths.

Reproductive psychiatrist, Dr. Emily Dossett, and executive director of the Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health, Joy Burkhard, join this episode of the Business Group on Health podcast to broaden our understanding of this stunning, yet largely unrecognized, relationship. We also learn about other maternal mental health challenges, the impact social determinants of health have on perinatal mental health, and how employers can help support mothers and their families.

More Information:

JAMA Psychiatry Research Review:

Health Affairs Article on Perinatal Mental Health:

Guests: Dr. Emily Dossett | Reproductive Psychiatrist; Founder & Director, Reproductive Mental Health Program at the LA General Medical Center

In this video, Harmail Chatha shares how he helped build a state-of-the-art, efficient data center using software-defined capabilities from Nutanix.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Transcript:

Ken Kaplan: When you started building these early on, sustainability was definitely a part of it. You want to make them efficient, but it’s shifted.

Harmail Chatha: So when I first started, sustainability wasn’t even a thing in the industry, right? You heard about sustainability farms and food production and stuff like that, but you didn’t hear about it too much in the tech sector. And of course, larger companies like HPE, and Cisco, have been at it for a long time, but customers really, really never understood it and it wasn’t very top of mind. The way that I got involved in sustainability really started in 2018, not knowing that I was trying to build a sustainable data center, but I’ve actually built one of the most sustainable data centers. And what the premise of that build-out, the architecture then was, we wanted it optimized. We wanted to ensure the amount of power coming into a rack was exactly the amount of power we’re using within the rack, and that the rack wasn’t under provision.

So we’re only using half of the rack, but we’re maximizing full utilization of the rack itself. As I started getting more involved with ESG and specifically the E portion of it, IT consumes a major part of total power in any organization and IT manages the data centers. And we started to realize, wow, we have some really efficient data centers that we architected back in 2018, and we got some not-so-efficient data centers around the world that are more colo retail, a couple of racks here and there. 

[Related: Building Scalable, Sustainable Data Centers]

So for us, our multi-megawatt data centers are the most sustainable data centers. We sought out partners that were focused on minimizing their environmental impact by having a lower PUE, and by having innovative strategies around water reclamation. And that really offered us solutions and options around renewable energy as well. So that baseline with that premise set, and now we’re in 2023 and sustainability is top of mind for everybody. For example, we conducted an annual ECI, Enterprise Cloud Index, survey with 1500 global IT leaders, and 92% of the respondents said that sustainability is more top of mind this year than it was last year. With that sustainability starts at the data center. I mean, there are obviously different scopes of sustainability, but IT being the largest consumer makes the biggest impact and can have the most impact on reductions as well.

Ken Kaplan: And this experience that you’re gaining, you’ve done the work that was very successful.

Harmail Chatha:  So it was an epiphany to be involved in ESG, specifically the E, and to understand that data centers I built in 2018 are a core part of Nutanix’s environmental impact and the fact that they’re so sustainable. We don’t have to go back and reinvent the wheel because our data centers are already hyper-dense. We’re already maximizing the utilization of power and real estate within the data center. On top of that, we’re already gaining more impact by having renewable energy options and being able to offset or be carbon neutral in our data centers as well. So we got lucky. We’re ahead of the game. It was very smart and intuitive for us to kind of have that focus of optimization, which has ultimately led to more efficiency in the environmental impact.

[Related: Experts Discuss Top IT Sustainability Challenges]

Ken Kaplan: Tell me about your journey, Nutanix’s journey towards sustainable IT.

Harmail Chatha: So Nutanix’s journey really started when the company started itself, right? A step in the right direction, whether they knew it then or not, with hybrid converged infrastructure was this very sustainable approach. So from the get-go we’ve always been a sustainable company per se. But really in 2018 when we revamped our data center strategy, when we went to hyperdense rack design, we even got more sustainable. We only got the amount of power that we needed for our consumption. We only got the right amount of real estate that we needed for our hyperdense racks as well. So those two steps were key in our sustainability journey. But ultimately what we focus on is reducing our infrastructure footprint. We try to consolidate as much as we can. Our standard architecture in the data center is a four-node block, so that way we’re maximizing the power in the space within the rack in itself. 

So that was really the third step we took is the consolidation. And then within our platform, we ensured that we weren’t over-provisioning and underutilizing, meaning that we only provisioned infrastructure that we needed for a specific workload or a data set without an overkill of infrastructure in itself as well. We avoided VM sprawl problems as well, ensuring that we’re only running the VMs that we need to run and then hibernating or deleting the rest of the VMs as well. And then ultimately what that led to is a carbon reduction on the back end of it, right? Because our environment is so highly efficient from the data center provider to our power consumption and real estate utilization to our consolidation of infrastructure, eliminating waste of over provisioning, and underutilizing has really led to a much more sustainable carbon-neutral footprint for us in the data center environment.

Experts in modern data center technologies and sustainability provide valuable insights for building IT sustainability strategies.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Transcript:

Mat Brown: There is a lot of regulation coming, a lot of legislation.

Andrea Osika: Between 2021 and 2022 there was an 80% increase in regs that encompass ESG.

Harmail Chatha: If you’re going to build a sustainability strategy, budget should be the starting point. By consolidating the hardware, you’re reducing your power footprint by 35%.

Jason Lopez: What you’re about to hear are the highlights from a breakout session for IT pros who attended the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Chicago. The speakers are from Nutanix, Andrea Osika, who is laser-focused on sustainability in ESG, Mat Brown, technical marketing manager, along with Harmel Chatha, who leads global hybrid multi-cloud operations. They work on sustainability issues, which are reported in Nutanix’s annual Environmental, Social, and Governance report. This is the Tech Barometer Podcast. If your IT organization is trying to navigate ESG, this segment sheds light on IT sustainability trends and insights Nutanix has gained from evolving its own sustainability efforts. They reveal their experiences in adapting to various waves of change, including uptime and costs, security and regulations, particularly around carbon compliance and the management of greenhouse emissions through FinOps and AIOps. Andrea Osika starts off with this: as sustainability becomes increasingly central to business operations and strategy, IT professionals and executives will be expected to adapt to, in fact, their performance often measured by, a focus on ESG.

[Related: Data Center Decisions Draw on Sustainability Strategies]

Andrea Osika: When I started in this space, a lot of very large companies mostly had initiatives around this. And it was kind of seen as a nice-to-have. But if you think about the definition of sustainability and balancing today versus tomorrow, there’s business value that’s involved. And it turns out that companies who set short-term goals and balance those with sustainability metrics have actually outperformed the market in the last 10 years. So this has made investors take notice. Depending on what app you use to look at your publicly traded stocks, you might see now a sustainability tab. And we’re going to add on top of that an energy crisis and more environmentally-minded customers and even talent that your organization wants to attract and hire and then even retain. They’re all paying attention to what different organizations are doing in this space, particularly in Europe, in the UK, over in Asia. There are all kinds of pending and imposed regulations that are coming. I have been attending so many webinars and working with consultants to try and keep up. It seems like the goalpost is almost moving as we try to find a way to standardize and communicate all of these metrics. And one way is through an ESG report. I know I throw acronyms around. I’ve said it a couple of times, but environmental, social, and governance.

Jason Lopez: The 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index Report, or ECI, showed that 95% of IT professionals saw sustainability becoming more crucial in business decisions. The more recent 2024 ECI report shows IT pros are actively integrating sustainability strategies with their IT modernization efforts. Many organizations have become more data-driven about sustainability. 51% of organizations say they improved their ability to identify areas for reducing waste. 44% indicate they improved their ability to monitor and measure greenhouse gas emissions, as well as their carbon footprint. In the breakout session, Nutanix experts explained how the environmental impact of technology goes deeper than power usage and metrics. There’s the lifecycle of IT hardware, starting with the mining of metals and minerals, the manufacturing process, packaging, shipping, the management of devices in an IT setting, and the eventual disposal of the devices. Mat Brown identified a starting point for a business case. Dive into getting educated about sustainability facts, build relationships with like-minded individuals and organizations, plan and implement, identify the metrics relevant to the organization’s operations, and automate the measurement of those metrics.

[Related: 4 Steps for Building an IT Sustainability Strategy]

Mat Brown: IT is both a big part of the problem, particularly for companies that aren’t involved in manufacturing. They are often emitting the most carbon emissions through the use of their data center and other IT services. But technology is also, of course, a massive part of the solution, potentially. Whether it’s digital transformation, removing paper processes, automating lots of operations, smart building management to be more energy efficient, improving logistics and mapping out routes and things like that. On the one hand, we’re this big consumer of energy that’s being asked to consume less. And on the other hand, we’re also the platform where they want to do all of this smart, intelligent AI and ML stuff to improve the world around us. And what we’re starting to learn is that everything has a footprint and everything adds up.

Jason Lopez: As Andrea Osika talks about frameworks used for measuring power consumption and measuring carbon emissions, she introduces the concept of scope. Each scope, from Scope 1 to Scope 3, classifies emissions based on their source and whether emissions are direct or indirect.

Andrea Osika: Scope comes from the greenhouse gas protocol, which is the basis for all carbon emissions reporting worldwide. It’s essentially the gold standard for how companies report their emissions. And it’s broken down into three categories. They are in the order of descending control of the reporting organization. So if we start at the top, those are the direct emissions. That’s scope 1. And these are the emissions that are released into the air, typically from combustion, from burning something. And if you think about what that means in real terms, that’s like if your organization has a fleet of vehicles or the natural gas that’s used to heat your facilities. Those are two kinds of concrete examples. Scope 2 are indirect emissions. And they are a result of energy that is used to produce power. So typically this is in the form of steam or electricity. So electricity in your organization’s facilities and your data centers. And then scope 3 is the easiest one for me to explain. But it’s the most challenging. Even the greenhouse gas protocol tells us that this is something that they need to continue to work on. But it is literally everything else. This is your value chain. This is your hardware, your OPEX, your CAPEX. This all falls into scope 3. This is how your organization will report your emissions. And if you need an easy way to remember scopes 1, 2, and 3, here’s how I’ve learned. The energy that you burn. The energy that you buy. Everything else.

[Related: Experts Discuss Top IT Sustainability Challenges]

Jason Lopez: Focusing on scope 2 and scope 3 emissions is where Nutanix and other tech companies see the most opportunity to influence their overall carbon footprint, either through improving energy efficiency or by addressing the broader impacts of their products and services on the environment.

Mat Brown: How far does the rabbit hole go? Well, it certainly goes to embedded emissions in the hardware that are built and shipped to a facility. That’s one thing. Any cables you buy to plug in. It also includes any cloud services you may use, SAS services, bare metal services, and things like that. Those are probably a lot more tangible that you can get a feel of. Some providers also will be able to feed back to you the emissions associated with those services provided. Others less so. How their methodologies work probably are on an ongoing basis, but often they’re estimated using monetary values or something like that. Scope 2 is really where we talk a lot more to our customers about. So when a customer has their own data center, the electricity used to power that IT in the rack, that is a scope 2 emission. Somebody somewhere is burning fuel, gas, coal, or even renewable energy comes with a carbon footprint. That all adds up to power the IT equipment that we have running in our data centers.

Jason Lopez: This is where Harmel Chatha comes in. He’s responsible for running Nutanix’s hybrid multi-cloud IT operations. He explains how Nutanix and its customers leverage software-defined hyper-converged infrastructure, which brings operational efficiencies and helps manage and scale resources wisely. Chatha talks about using fewer resources, generating less waste, and avoiding unnecessary complexity by relying on modern IT solutions.

Harmail Chatha: We reduced our infrastructure footprint. We consolidated where we could. We got away, not that we ever had, three-tier architecture as well. We only deploy hardware that’s required. It’s not deployed in a safe manner on the over-provision just to be safe that I have enough capacity. Step two of it is really eliminating waste and over-provisioning. You only buy what you need, you only deploy what you need to deploy, and you only run the services that need to be run. And step three is really the benefits of step one and two, which leads to carbon reduction. That means you can deploy your applications anywhere you like across any region, wherever the power is cheapest at that given point in time. Now that we’ve got some context around what can be done, let’s apply to what we have done. So Nutanix is about 12 years old. We inherently are sustainable from the HCI perspective because we integrate, converge, compute, storage, and networking into our stack. Since 2010 when Nutanix started, we already had a sustainable footprint, whether we knew it or we didn’t. Nobody was really measuring sustainability at that point. But then in 2018, we took a bigger step. We revamped our data center strategy from our data center where we initially started to a new strategy where we consolidated our racks. We’re populating our racks with 92 nodes. That is 23 blocks in a single rack. And what we gain from that is 68% more efficiency from an OpEx, CapEx perspective, and consolidation perspective. If we are already an HCI stack, we’re already 100% virtualized in our environments. There is no bare metal one-to-one environment in any of our data centers. The last couple of years, we voluntarily started reporting our ESG reporting. And this is so complex. So for us, sustainability has been and will continue to be a journey, not just a one-off set destination that we can check off now that we’ve done our ESG report. We’re super sustainable. We’re not by any means. That first year, we only focused on Scope One, Scope Two, and Scope Three related to our data centers and related to our offices’ total power consumption.

[Related: Building Scalable, Sustainable Data Centers]

Jason Lopez: Understanding what to measure means identifying the relevant metrics that would accurately reflect the company’s impact on the environment. Then it’s determining how to measure. No small feat given the number of locations and data centers. To manage and analyze this vast amount of data, his team consolidated the information into Google Sheets as a starting point. Partners with the expertise to measure emissions helped. Chatha says it seemed they had a baseline.

Harmail Chatha: But no, we didn’t. The second year, we learned more. We gained a better understanding of how to measure. The data was more accurate, so hence our emission reporting was much more accurate. But in year three of our ESG report, we implemented a SaaS platform that actually aggregates in real time all of our power consumption from our leased offices and our data centers. So we can go to the platform and actually check it out in real time which location is utilizing how much power and what the footprint of that is. We got away from the Google Sheets. We’ve got a platform now. Data is more accurate. Our emissions calculation is more accurate.

Jason Lopez: A strategic approach to sustainable IT begins with the optimization of the infrastructure platform. As Mat Brown describes, it offers the potential for significant environmental benefits and supports things like the deployment of sustainable applications and better management of hardware life cycles.

Mat Brown: If you can use less hardware, then that obviously is a good thing for embodied emissions. There’s less power supply potentially in that hardware. That’s another good thing for reducing power consumption. But if you think about how you can reuse or repurpose IT equipment, there’s recycling programs in place. You have the choice of hardware vendor, even down to choice of components, whether that’s an Intel CPU or an AMD CPU. You can look at their various properties, features, et cetera, and see what fits your business requirements around your hardware life cycle and circularity the best. So take up that choice where you can.

[Related: Green Data Centers: Designing a Sustainable IT Future]

Jason Lopez: Different electricity grids in different countries or regions have different carbon intensity. Carbon intensity refers to the amount of CO2 produced per unit of electricity generated. Grids that rely heavily on coal or oil have a much higher carbon intensity compared to renewable sources like wind, solar, or hydro.

Mat Brown: For example, if you had a data center in Poland and you were able to magically shift it up to Sweden where there’s a lot more renewable energy with a lot lower carbon intensity, that could be a 30 times drop in the use phase emissions for that platform. In order to work out how much IT platforms emit or are responsible for in terms of carbon emissions, you’ll need to know that carbon intensity grid factor, which you can get from a variety of sources. And you’ll also want to know something called the power usage effectiveness of your facility. Those tend down towards one, the lower being the more efficient. But it’s not just all about the PUE. Reducing power at the rack can be much more effective than just shrinking a few percentage points on the power usage effectiveness of the data center. But being able to place your workload potentially where it’s going to run in the most efficient way is very key to this whole physical location, power, and environment.

Jason Lopez: He said Nutanix emphasizes the critical dynamic between infrastructure and power usage. Modernizing data centers increases flexibility, scalability, and encourages more innovation in IT while consuming less power.

Mat Brown: Because that platform’s all integrated in a single pane of glass, you can then start working on your operational efficiency more and more, optimizing the actual demand, optimizing what consumers of IT are asking for, doing right sizing, using AIOps for improvement, reducing waste, oversized VM everywhere, implementing show back, charge back, or even recently I heard the term at a FinOps discussion, shame back, to shame people who weren’t implementing their optimizations effectively. You can put the impact in front of the user, the application owner, and show them what they’re responsible for and feed back to them, then they can take on more responsibility for driving optimization.Jason Lopez: Mat Brown is Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at Nutanix. Harmail Chatha is Nutanix’s Senior Director of Global Cloud Operations. Andrea Osika is Marketing Manager of Sustainability at Nutanix. What you heard were the highlights from a stage presentation on sustainability given during the .NEXT conference in Chicago in 2023. This is the Tech Barometer podcast. I’m Jason Lopez. Tech Barometer is produced by The Forecast. For more podcasts and stories about technology and the people in tech, you can find it at theforecastbynutanix.com.