EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
JIM STEED , MANAGING DIRECTOR , NUTANIX A / NZ
igital capabilities are
D no longer a ‘ nice to have ’, they ’ re now a ‘ need to have ’.
Between the ubiquity of remote work , the explosion of e-commerce and the adoption of innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in even the most traditional industries , businesses today are generating an incredible amount of data every single second .
It is in the data centre that all this information is generated , stored , analysed and actioned . All the computing power needed to do this requires huge amounts of energy , dwarfed only by the amount of energy required to prevent all the necessary components from overheating .
This voracious energy consumption is compounded in traditional data centres that are notorious for their inefficiency . Without getting too technical , the legacy approach to three-tier data centres is to have at least two of everything – servers , storage and networking – in case something fails .
Making matters even worse , most servers are unbelievably underutilised , often running below half their capacity to leave a buffer for additional resources to cater for unforeseen spikes in demand .
So not only is there two of everything , the duplicates run at an even lower fraction of their actual capacity .
As the cost-of-energy crisis continues to take a toll on business balance sheets , even Australia ’ s Department of Industry , Science , Energy and Resources highlights ‘ low server use remains one of the largest opportunities for energy savings in data centres ’.
So as Australian businesses look to make a real impact on their emissions and reduce their energy bills , transforming their data centres is often the first port of call . An exemplar of this data centre transformation is Victoria ’ s Natures Organics .
The manufacturer of popular brands Earth ’ s Choice and Australian Pure implemented Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure – which collapses duplicate infrastructure needs and runs even the largest workloads with less physical equipment through server virtualisation – and immediately lowered its IT-related energy consumption by 55 %.
This supported the company ’ s commitment in eco-initiatives and complemented its 1299kW roof-mounted solar array installed on its manufacturing
THE BIGGEST IMPACT THE CURRENT COST- OF-ENERGY CRISIS IS HAVING ON THE DATA CENTRE INDUSTRY IS THAT IT IS HIGHLIGHTING JUST HOW INEFFICIENT THE LEGACY THREE- TIER APPROACH REALLY IS .
plant , reducing carbon emissions by 1,000 tons annually .
So , the biggest impact the current cost-ofenergy crisis is having on the data centre industry is that it is highlighting just how inefficient the legacy three-tier approach really is . This is motivating organisations across the region to modernise their infrastructure and , in the process , transform their businesses . www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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