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In this video, learn how a cloud operations expert thinks about power efficiency, software-defined infrastructure and how to get more with less from data center innovation.

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

Transcript:

Ken Kaplan: What does the data center signify to you? What’s the role?

Harmail Chatha: So whether people know it or not, data centers are a very crucial part of everyone’s daily lives, right? All the applications that we have on our mobile phones and our desktops, all the websites that we visit come from a data center. A public cloud is actually a large scale data center in itself as well. So anything that’s tech related goes back to a data house where it’s hosted and hence the services are provided.

Ken Kaplan: Everything we do from health to going to the grocery store increasingly touches the data center.

Harmail Chatha: Absolutely. Health for sure. All the images, all the applications that are used within the hospitals as well. The POS systems and restaurants and grocery stores for sure. Airline industry, when you’re booking your tickets online, that’s all being served by a data center. So really just about anything digital has something to do with the data center.

Ken Kaplan: Part of building the data centers that you’ve helped build: a critical part is the hardware that needs to go in and the power consumption that needs to run it. How is that changing?

Harmail Chatha: So I’ve been in the data center industry since 2005. Back in the day it was small, 42 U racks, maybe three to four kilowatts per rack of power utilization. Maybe you half fill those racks and you had multiple power coming into the rack from a redundancy perspective. But to the point we’re at now, we’re pushing multi kilowatts into a rack. Specifically at Nutanix, we’re between 17.3 to 34 kilowatts per rack. Racks have gone very high density in the sense that we’re able to deploy a lot more compute, especially with hyperconverged infrastructure where you’re able to consolidate storage, networking, and compute into a single server. You’re able to really impact and pack these racks up with compute, which ultimately requires a lot of power and therefore requires a lot of cooling from the data center provider as well. So we call it a hyperdense rack design.

Ken Kaplan: You’re talking a lot about hardware, but software’s playing a key role here, just capabilities you’re being able to take on because of the advancements in software.

Harmail Chatha: Yeah, so software obviously is a huge part of it. One, starting at the lower tier infrastructure consolidation is a first step in the right direction, but ultimately it comes down to the software. Our data centers are software defined from a networking perspective. It’s all white box switches and we control the entire network through software itself. Our infrastructure is all controlled through clusters that are provisioned through AOS, AHV and Prism Central. And what that’s leading us to is infrastructure has a three to five year lifecycle, but we’re actually pushing that lifecycle longer now through our software. Because the software is getting more efficient, it’s better able to utilize the underlying hardware, therefore we’re able to use that hardware on a five to seven, eight year cycle in itself. So software really is becoming the core. Infrastructure is agnostic at the lower tier and software is dictating the lifecycle.

Ken Kaplan: How did you connect with your data center most recently to check on it and see how it’s doing?

Harmail Chatha: Yeah, so our data centers are lights out data centers for the most part. Our bigger data centers, we do have some folks in them, but because they’re so software defined, we don’t have to go to the data center every day. The ones that are lights out through hardware and making sure we have enough redundancy. Then the software being able to manage the VMs. If we do have a hardware failure, there’s really no need for us to go to the data center. And because we got a blueprint for scaling out our data center when we are at a capacity that’s really simple for us to expand. Example would be during the pandemic, we expanded one of our data centers by two megawatts during the pandemic. And that’s no easy feat, right? That’s a lot of physical build out. But because I’ve got such a great team, we got such amazing architecture that was ahead of its time, we’re able to leverage that in addition to the partnerships that we built as well. So there really isn’t a need for me to go to the data center anymore. I think ever since the pandemic started, I’ve probably been once and that was more to check in on the team, make sure they’re doing good in our larger data center. But the remote ones I haven’t been to in several years.

Ken Kaplan: Now, how about virtually? Are you checking it two or three times a day? Are you looking at through your laptop on your phone? What is that part like?

Harmail Chatha: So virtually, we’ve got a lot of alerts set up for the data center as well. So if something does go wrong, a power PDU goes out, cooling is inefficient, we’ve got systems in place where we get alerts that’s at the infrastructure tier from a data center perspective. But for our infrastructure of Nutanix and the cluster that we manage, they’re all software defined as well. We get alerts through Prism Central. We’re able to act on those alerts remotely. Even if there’s a failure of a hard drive or a power supply, we’re able to call some people in and just get that fixed. But the data center interaction is really mostly at the software level now and not at the physical level.

It has been estimated that anywhere between 24 to 50 million Americans, the majority of whom are women, are affected by autoimmune diseases, with onset often occurring during their prime working years.

Tune in to this episode of the Business Group on Health podcast to hear from Dr. Elizabeth Ortiz, a double-board certified rheumatologist and patient advocate. Dr. Ortiz shares the biggest challenges facing those with autoimmune diseases, research on why these conditions more often affect women, and how employers can support patients through health and well-being benefit programs.

Guest: Dr. Elizabeth Ortiz | Rheumatologist l Founder, Connected Rheumatology

In this video interview, Mat Brown, senior technical marketing engineer at Nutanix, discusses the increasing importance of data center sustainability strategies and the challenges of managing carbon emissions from IT operations.

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

Transcription:

Mat Brown: Increasingly, our customers are asking us about sustainability issues and about ESG. They want to know about the carbon emissions related to their IT solutions, whether they’re running them in their own data center at a co-location or in public cloud. These are becoming top of mind for more and more customers all the time.

It’s especially grown up over the last couple of years. What’s really kicked that on has been the energy crisis that’s built up in Europe especially. But then more and more regulation is coming out of the EU and in other places around the world, and that’s driving these sustainability challenges for businesses everywhere.

[Related: Three Trends Defining IT Sustainability in 2024]

Eventually it’s going to be have to embedded into every part of the business they do. I’d expect people will be doing sustainability training, like they do security training, and I expect that people will be reporting on their organization’s and missions like they currently report on their financial practice.

Yeah, so we’ve kind of mapped out four steps on the road to progress, as it were for organizations. Of course, the fundamental basis for everything is a better understanding of impact, but also an understanding of what your business goals are. Who are your allies? Who can you talk to and what resources are at your disposal? From there, you can understand what you need to measure, start implementing the processes to make those measurements, and then on that basis you can then plan and transform and build a business case for future activity as well.

In this Tech Barometer podcast, explore how data management and security innovations are bringing resilience to escalating threats of data destruction and exfiltration.

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

Transcript:

John Dodds: Data governance and regulatory frameworks are creating the impetus to involve ransomware. It’s like creating the external factor.

Tuhina Goel: Today it has really evolved into pure data destruction, data exfiltration. So that’s one major difference we’ve seen in the last couple of years.

Jason Lopez: On this edition of Tech Barometer, ransomware. The latest trends and developments from two people behind the scenes working on technologies to keep data protected.

John Dodds: Every new cool technology comes out and solves an amazing problem immediately makes security more difficult because it’s new.

Jason Lopez: In 2023, the costs of cybersecurity and the payouts to ransomware criminal organizations rose to unprecedented levels. Businesses lost over a billion dollars in payouts. Hospitals, school systems, public utilities have been prime targets. 

John Dodds: How can we go from detecting as fast as possible to closing the risk holes before they even become exploitable? That’s where AI is going to be a big deal because we have the power at the edge now to make it a reality. 

John Dodds: The privacy thing has really created a big problem because it’s not just a matter of, oh, I can ignore the ransom and maybe I had good backup hygiene and things like that. 

Jason Lopez: John Dodds is a cybersecurity expert who’s part of the product management team at Nutanix. In the interview we did with him, he cited multiple factors which explain the rise of ransomware. 

John  Dodds: The data itself creates a problem because with all the different privacy regulations and data sovereignty rules and regulatory frameworks, it started with GDPR, moved into California Consumer Privacy Act. And now we have regulations in the European Union like DORA. All of these regulations are putting an emphasis on the data custodian’s responsibility to protect that data. Everyone knows that these companies could be held liable.

Jason Lopez: One kind of organization is especially vulnerable… health care companies. And they are increasingly vulnerable when hackers don’t just lock down data but steal it.

John Dodds: That information is so sensitive and so protected. When they get attacked and there’s any chance of exfiltration, they almost have to pay the ransom in some cases because penalties for violating HIPAA and violating all these other things, not just monetary, but also the human damage is getting very, very, very severe.

Jason Lopez: Many organizations are legally responsible for keeping the data on their platforms secure. But this exists, he says, within a compute environment that gives hackers numerous entryways. Dodds points out that, as users, we have more data freedom than ever before.

John Dodds: We have hybrid workforces coming in and VPN aggregators. We have people allowed to access corporate data on mobile devices like iPhones and Android devices. Security teams 20 years ago would have never have let that unrestricted, multidimensional access happen on corporate data that was considered sensitive. The reason why we have this power and flexibility of the modern hybrid workforce and the hybrid cloud environments out there is because these technologies have gotten much more seamless and much better. 

Jason Lopez: In the past many organizations might ignore a ransomware attack. But lately, more are paying the ransom. When you add up all the variables from sensitive information, data freedom and liability, the world which organizations operate in has become far more complicated.

John Dodds: Complicated is the right word. The ransomware attacks aren’t going to stop, but how we react to them is continuously complicated by everything that’s going on in the data governance world at the same time. 

Jason Lopez: In this simple hypothetical, Dodds illustrates how, along with threats from hackers, IT departments have to deal with regulators. 

John Dodds: There’s one thing that I could say that could probably scare you. Do you process credit card data?   If we were in a legal case and someone comes up and says, show me every single file that this person touched because I need to know if they had access to insider data or something like that, we were finding a lot of IT administrators sitting around with those kind of, I don’t know what to say because you’re not going to like the answer type of face.

Jason Lopez: Increased entry points for hackers, more data governance… those help explain the rise of ransomware attacks. There’s also been a change in the extortion itself.

Tuhina Goel: There are chances that you will be asked for additional ransom before you can eventually get access to your data. 

Jason Lopez: Tuhina Goel is the director of product marketing at Nutanix

Tuhina Goel: So there has been instances where corporations, they were asked to pay ransom, then they were asked to pay additional ransom. And in some cases, they still did not get back access to the data.

John Dodds: That secondary ask is absolutely diabolical because once you’ve made that threshold where you said your best business decision is to pay the ransom and you have that sunk cost, I hope I never end in a situation where I have to make that sort of decision.

Jason Lopez: If Dodds is right, if ransomware isn’t going to be stopped in its tracks anytime soon, what can an organization do?

John Dodds: The best way to protect yourself is to assume you’re going to get attacked and make sure that you’re doing everything to prevent it at the very beginning on the clients and on the front end, and then ensuring that you have those immutable air-gapped backup copies and snapshots somewhere so that if it does happen to you, it’s an inconvenience that you can recover from. That’s the best way to make it worthless to a hacker.

Jason Lopez: He says practices like using strong algorithms and salting of keys helps to make data useless.

John Dodds: The way that you devalue the data to a hacker is by proper cyber resiliency built in with many layers of defense, including air-gapped backup copies. So the reason why that data will no longer be valuable to the hacker is if they can’t get into it and it’s properly encrypted, it’s only valuable to  a hacker if they have your only good copy of the data. 

Jason Lopez: Tech innovation since the rise of the Internet, such as mobility or the cloud, have certainly given companies more tools. But with that, more to protect. 

John Dodds: It’s a cloud adoption question. Every new cool technology comes out and solves an amazing problem immediately makes security more difficult because it’s new. I hate that that’s the way it usually ebbs and flows. But generally, there’s a reason why cloud was slowly adopted by financial services companies and healthcare companies. They were very conservative on the security side, and they were like, let’s wait and see before we bless this stuff.

Tuhina Goel: We talk about cloud native applications and how everything’s going to be born in the cloud. And we ourselves as Nutanix, we support hybrid cloud, right? So we are more than an on-prem company. But there are industries whose first preference is to keep their most coveted asset on-prem because the control measures are much more in control, right? So it’s just easier to manage that.

Jason Lopez: Since the advent of the Internet, and by extension the cloud, it’s not as if cybersecurity has been after thought. Technologists have been working on it all along. Nutanix’s cybersecurity journey began with storage.

John Dodds: As storage got bigger, as audit logs became bigger, as threats became more diverse, permission structures are inherently super complex, we found out that we needed to move to cloud scale. So that was kind of the evolution of data lens, which was let’s do everything we can to make NUS as easy to use to its highest degree for our customers as possible. Because we didn’t just want NUS to be a great tool, we wanted our customers to be able to use what made it great. Then we ran into some scale limits, and that’s kind of how data lens was evolved. 

Jason Lopez: Data Lens is designed to give ransomware resilience to unstructured data on the Nutanix Cloud Platform. It focuses on proactive detection and rapid containment to prevent security breaches before they can cause significant harm. It uses one click recovery and offers tools for compliance and risk analysis. The precursor to Data Lens was a free tool called file analytics, which was essential intelligence for managing data and storage. 

John Dodds: Everyone was playing catch up on ransomware on files-based storage systems. We’re trying to learn from that and stay ahead of ransomware on object storage systems.

Tuhina Goel: One of their recent emerging technologies is cyber storage, where the expectation is the storage systems will be able to defend themselves against ransomware, especially the unstructured storage, which is files and objects. So the idea is that inherently the storage system should have capabilities to defend itself against ransomware. 

John Dodds: It was much more complex to defend security threats on objects because they’re the current state of the art in terms of sophistication in a lot of cases, and there’s no established kit for object-based ransomware. So we saw the benefit that we had on files, and we didn’t want object storage systems to be left out. They are a core source of unstructured data now. So at the same time we did this ransomware containment window, we added support for NUS objects auditing and data lifecycle reporting and anomaly detection.

John Dodds: We’re legitimately investigating uses for real AI models now. We’re starting to see that the chips have become powerful enough. The models have become sophisticated enough for these multi-ontology LLMs to really start to do some really cool things for security and we’re actively researching, how can we take our ML-ish types of things that are more statistical? How can we use AI to push that to the appliances themselves?  Security is actually a really good place for it because it is a complex layer of permission structures that were human designed constructs that were put on top of a file system, constructs that were put on top of a directory services infrastructure, data that’s being managed by thousands of individual little unique humans. We can’t set one policy that everyone will adhere to. That’s where we’re actually pushing the boundaries with AI. We’re taking a lot of our machine learning and basic AI stuff and saying, we have the data, we have to compute. We can now not just proactively monitor for threats, we can proactively identify the risk before it becomes exploited. 

Jason Lopez: Dodds essentially says that everything is on the table to not only help protect against ransomware, but to stay ahead of it. So, AI is one tool. What are the others?. 

John Dodds: The real answer is we need to already be thinking about adopting the post-quantum cryptography.

Jason Lopez: His team is already looking at three algorithms approved by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

John Dodds: We’re already evaluating how we can implement Crystals Kyber and Crystals Dilithium, which are two of the NIST approved quantum resistant algorithms. The problem is always going to be, it’s all theoretical.

Jason Lopez: That’s a key concept in the discussion. As much as technologies and cutting edge advancements have a major role to play in protecting against ransomware, both Dodds and Goel place the factor of human nature prominently in the conversation about cybersecurity.

John Dodds: You want to know why I love hackers? Because I feel like they’re my people. If there’s something that I can find that defines a hacker, the attribute that first comes to mind is laziness. The laziness is winning because there’s easier targets. Ransomware hackers can go out there and try to reverse engineer and circumvent all these protections. But why do that when it’s still easy to check out someone’s LinkedIn profile and find someone at the end of the day who’s thinking about what they’re going to make for dinner that night, call them up on a phone and try to socially engineer them?

Tuhina Goel: There’s no silver bullet when it comes to ransomware or protection against ransomware. People and processes play an as important role as technology does. It’s a people problem. It’s a people loophole. So it’s very important to also pay attention and time and energy budget towards prioritizing employee training and awareness, because that goes hand in hand with what technology can do.

Jason Lopez: Tuhina Goel is director of product marketing at Nutanix. John Dodds is a cybersecurity technologist at Nutanix working in security and data governance product management. This episode of Tech Barometer is produced by The Forecast. I’m Jason Lopez. You’ll find more podcasts and articles like this one at theforecastbynutanix.com. That’s www.the forecastbynutanix.com.

In response to the increased prevalence of pediatric obesity, the American Academy of Pediatrics published new comprehensive Clinical Practice Guideline for the Evaluation and Treatment of Children and Adolescents with Obesity in 2023. In addition to urging pediatricians to more quickly offer treatment, the guideline identifies the secondary medical complications associated with obesity that children are experiencing, including hypertension, fatty liver disease, diabetes and arthritis.

In this episode of the Business Group on Health podcast, Dr. Ilene Fennoy, a pediatric endocrinologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center / New York-Presbyterian, explains the guidance, offers recommended treatment options and shares strategies for communicating care needs to parents, teens and young children.

Thank you to today’s episode sponsor Abett.

More Information: CDC Recognized Family Healthy Weight Programs:

Guest: Ilene Fennoy, MD | Pediatric Endocrinologist l Columbia University Irving Medical Center / New York-Presbyterian

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

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

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. 

[Related: AI Reorients IT Operations]

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 the EU, there’s regulation emerging in the US. 89% of institutional investors look at ESG stories when they invest in technology companies. Yes, they’ll save the environment, but there’s also a huge profit motive to do the right thing. And the way you do the right thing is to efficiently manage your resources.

Harmail Chatha: Well, I feel like we’ve been trying to tackle edge community for like 10 plus years now. That’s still a very hot topic. Everyone’s creating these edge data centers and what does that really mean?

[Related: Building Scalable, Sustainable Data Centers]

Jason Lopez: Harmal Chautha illustrates that the world of IT is evolving rapidly. As data center hubs connect with more dispersed computer resources, such as branch offices, franchise stores, warehouses, or manufacturing plants powered with robots and thousands of connected devices.

Harmail Chatha: Prior to the last couple of years, it was a few hundred kilowatts was your edge. And now we’re pushing it to a megawatt plus is becoming your edge. We conducted our enterprise cloud index study with over 1500 IT decision makers globally and 92% are saying their top of my initiative is corporate sustainability and how do they tackle that? And I think the same conversation holds up. How do you optimize your infrastructure, reduce your footprint, even if it’s at the edge or it’s at your core data center? How do you get away from this three-tier architecture? Consolidate the infrastructure, eliminate the waste and the over-provisioning that happens in a typical three-tier architecture. You’re definitely going to over-provision on compute, you’ll over-provision on network and storage. So how do you eliminate that? You should only be deploying what you need, not over-extending. With the Nutanix infrastructure, even if it’s at the edges, you buy what you initially need, then you scale out. And you maximize that utilization of it and you can build metrics at one point, do you expand the cluster or not? And that inherently will reduce your carbon footprint as well because you’ll be consuming less power and less resources. So wherever the play is, whether it’s in the edge or primary or robo-offices, just this notion of consolidation is tremendous. And going to, again, to Steve’s point is, optimizing at the software tier and then extending the life of the hardware.

Jason Lopez: It’s becoming more important, the shift to software-defined IT strategies, which leverage hybrid multi-cloud resources. Chatha says the mindset today is centered around maximizing resource efficiency in the face of growing demands for more powerful computing resources.

Harmail Chatha: We’re testing GPUs in our environment with our software. And of course, they’re very power-hungry, they’re very intensive. But it goes back to that same point again, is how do you make use of consolidation versus just expanding horizontally? We have this notion in our data centers when we designed them in 2018, they’re optimized for vertical growth rather than horizontal growth. We recognize a 68% reduction in OpEx, CapEx by optimizing vertically versus horizontally. The IT initiative has to be optimization rather than playing it safe and buying so much hardware, so much compute, storage and network, and over-provisioning. And that inherently has been the go-to model in IT versus now IT is having to refocus and say, okay, how do we optimize within the stack rather than horizontally at the hardware tier?

[Related: Making the Future of Streaming Media More Sustainable]

Steen Dalgas: I’ve just been working on a case for the last three weeks on an edge case in partnership with a data center company. And what that highlights is Nutanix doesn’t have all the answers, the data center companies don’t have all the answers. It’s all about how you can leverage the best team and each individual player brings their best foot forward. So on the data center side, we’ve started working with a, in the UK, a company that’s come up with a pod-like design. So traditionally, if you go to a co-location data center, you’re limited to five KBAs, that’s pretty industry standard. What that does is it limits the design because you only fill the rack a quarter full. But this company’s come up with a design of 20, so 20 KBAs, so we can actually fill out the whole rack. It’s a two-part design, so you have a rack of servers, HCI servers, and then a rack of all the data center infrastructure. That would be really well-designed for edge AI-type cases. And it can just sit in a car park. And from a cooling perspective, it’s incredibly efficient. So with air cooling, they’re at 1.3 PUE, but you could potentially put liquid cooling into this, which would bring it down further. So this is the type of innovation partnerships where the HCI form factor of our software, our design, plus a really good data center, innovative partner, could create a brilliant solution. And if you compare that to traditionally, you’re going to be looking at racks and racks to fit within the normal rules. So this is how we need to go out to the market, find the best partners, and then bring these solutions to our customers.

Steve McDowell: And the hardware guys are not ignoring this either. As Steve just said, we’re pushing liquid cooling to the edge. I’m involved in a project now that’s using two-phase emerging cooling, where we’re putting a megawatt and a half into a rack about the size of a freezer in your garage. So we’re driving that down. And to put a number on it, 20 to 25% of data center IT is for heating and cooling. So while we’re driving consolidation with intelligence software, we also need to solve the cooling problem. And we’re pushing on that from a different direction.

[Related: The Amalgamation of AI and Hybrid Cloud]

Steen Dalgas: We have a huge problem globally with legacy IT. It’s incredibly inefficient. So if you went from a legacy infrastructure to an HCI in a new data sensor, you’re going to see a 80% reduction is pretty normal. Can we get companies out there to make that plunge?

Harmail Chatha: Well, I think the other thing is, hardware providers, software companies like us can continue to push the envelope, but are the data centers keeping up well? Some of these legacy data centers don’t have enough power to support vertical growth in the rack, and don’t have enough cooling to support that. So then you’re stuck at single-digit KBAs, whereas companies now are definitely going to liquid cooling and pushing the envelope even further, but then data center providers have to do their part.

Jason Lopez: The conversation moved to environmental responsibility, and how it’s becoming a crucial component of business strategies. There’s the rising cost of energy. There’s the increasing cost of maintaining legacy hardware inside data centers, which can hamper sustainability efforts.

Harmail Chatha: All of the European data center providers are definitely pushing the envelope on this. They’re a lot more ahead of the game, I feel, than the U.S. data centers, as far as just innovative technologies, innovative design. For them, sustainability is very top of mind, versus in the U.S., we personally seek out data center providers and partners that want to minimize the environmental impact, that have innovative solutions like water reclamation, that are offering renewable energy options. And I feel like the U.S. market just hasn’t caught up, besides a couple of top-tier providers that we work with, versus the rest of the, well, especially Europe. I don’t think AsiaPAC is definitely there.

[Related: Rapid Spread of Hybrid Multicloud IT Drives Need for Simplification]

Steen Dalgas: We’ve had the energy crisis in Europe, so we’ve seen the cost of energy go up almost five times. Really focuses the mind to suddenly, so I do total cost of ownership models. Energy is now the single biggest expense item now in the IT budget when we’re looking at infrastructure. So it’s cost-driven, yeah. So another thing that we’ve seen in Europe, which is all around the same area, so climate risks are now becoming a business resilience issue. So in the U.K., you’re designed to run at a certain temperature range, based on the sort of standardized models of climate. And those climate models don’t apply anymore. So it’s been broken in the U.K. So we had a 42-degree day. The impact of that was, so Google’s data center in the south of England went down, which took down one of the Challenger banks. It also had impacts in other regions as well. And one of the big hospitals in London had a failure of its production and DR data centers. And the impact for them was, they were on paper records for two months. So you can imagine the stress it puts on the staff and the impact on the patients. And there was a big cost impact as well. And that’s because that’s a legacy design data center. And the more infrastructure you have, the bigger the physical footprint you have, the more cooling you need. Those are the types of data centers that are more susceptible. So this whole sustainability piece I’m trying to highlight is a business resiliency issue.

Jason Lopez: Next, transforming IT infrastructure with a Nutanix customer in India. Harmail Chatha outlines how HCI technology reduces costs, emissions, and complexity.

Harmail Chatha: In working with Nutanix, they’re able to reduce their cost by 43% over five years versus traditional three-tier. They’re able to reduce their data center emissions by 80%. And they’re able to reduce their data backup management by 100%. So what’s happening is, IT just needs to rethink and refocus and modernize of getting off the traditional three-tier and moving to something that’s more efficient like HCI models. And with HCI, you don’t have just the option to reduce your physical footprint on-prem, but you have so many options, whether it’s your private data center or your colo or even public clouds. For us, I mean, the ecosystem has evolved so much now. You can get away from that traditional DR strategy of having something remote in a different data center versus now we have a product called NC2. You can offload your critical VMs right back to the public cloud and have them in a hybrid mode there, sitting there versus just running infrastructure that’s doing nothing, literally sitting idle on-prem. So I think it just needs to be a refocus of not focusing too much on, this is the way we’ve always done things and this is the way we’re going to continue to do things and really go out and seek innovation and opportunities to improve. Sustainability is a great starting point, but really it’s just our entire world runs on apps and data. And when you have issues like Steve was describing in the UK where the hospital’s offline for two months, that’s very critical.

Steen Dalgas: There’s a story just to illustrate that. So in the UK, one of our customers is the 999 service. So if you have an emergency, you ring them up. And they did things the wrong way around. So they decided to modernize their data center and then once they did that, they then decided to choose their IT partner. They then built this great, huge new data center room, went to Nutanix and we were a one rack solution. So you have a huge data center with a one rack. And this is what I mean is that you’re bringing a legacy mindset to solve a problem that you’re not taking advantage of the modern innovation. You have to do it in reverse. So think about what you’re going to have in a rack and then the data center and do that together, not separately.

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Steve McDowell: But there’s also a trend, too, of thinking less about the infrastructure as an IT guy. Cloud is driving this, right? We all think about cloud as someplace we can park resources. But we’re also seeing the emergence of things like HP GreenLake and Lenovo TrueScale, consumption based, where it’s in their interest, the technology providers to keep your technology current.

Chris Kanaracus: Cloud cost optimization and sustainability are linked topics, but I kind of look at it from the optimization side a little bit differently. I look at more from the IT buyer perspective of cloud services they’re buying and how they can buy them and where they can buy them. It’s a reward in a really new era. I think if the first era of cloud was about speed of adoption and using that scale and so forth, then you had all the waste and you had people finding out, ooh, I’m not using the cloud efficiently. I really think we’re in an era of cloud cost optimization really in the forefront. There’s a lot going on and I’ll give a couple of examples. One of the big pushbacks that customers have made, and we always hear from them, is from egress fees from the cloud providers. They hate paying data egress fees. Every single customer call I take, if this comes up, and have you guys heard of the Bandwidth Alliance? This is a group of companies that work with CDN providers and they kind of agree to waive or deeply discount egress fees to their joint customers, and that’s really good, and AWS is holding out. They kind of have not gone that direction yet. They need their margins to stay high and so forth, but that’s one example, but a more recent example is just more density in options for running your workloads around the world. It isn’t the big three anymore. I don’t know, Equinix on bare metal with VMC, that’s one example. Oracle’s trying to do, and it’s very new with Alloy, where they’re licensing their cloud whole stack to partners around the world, and they can rebrand it, white label it, and you own the customer relationship. Is it going to be cheaper? Possibly, because when you have more options to run your workloads, like any market, things have to go down. There’s much more work on portability. It’s just we’re in a good place for that. The problem isn’t solved, but we’re in a good era where we’ve built out this universe of cloud computing, but now people are really starting to and are able to optimize it for real.

Jason Lopez: Chris Kanaracus is Research Director of Cloud and Edge Services at IDC. Harmail Chatha is Senior Director of Global Cloud Operations at Nutanix. Steve McDowell is Principal Analyst with NAND Research, and Steen Dalgas is with Nutanix, and at the time of this recording, he served as Cloud Economist for the company. This is the Tech Barometer Podcast, produced by The Forecast. I’m Jason Lopez, thank you for listening. For more stories on sustainability or on technology in general, you can check us out at theforecastbynutanix.com. That’s www.theforecastbynutanix.com. 

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