Environmental Sustainability – Model9, your partner for a sustainable data center
What is “environmental sustainability” when it comes to our corporations? Is it just another fad amongst many in these times of change and transition? Why should it even interest or affect you? Well, in this blog we will attempt to explain the practice, its benefits, challenges and first practical steps for you to take.
Recent research by Gartner shows that sustainability is a top 10 business priority for organizations, with 80% of enterprises with a sustainability strategy prioritizing infrastructure, operations, and cloud investments by 2024. Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) play a crucial role in mitigating the environmental impact of IT services, such as data centers, network services, and end-user devices.
When beginning the sustainability journey, we need to be able to pinpoint relevant metrics that will allow us to measure a benchmark from which we could set attainable goals. Since this is a relatively new practice, many CIO’s and I&O professionals find it difficult to begin. Not knowing what direction to take in tackling the challenges.
The first steps: Metrics and their measurement
One of the metrics used is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) which measures the efficiency of A/C and power distribution needed to operate our data centers. In addition, when discussing corporate sustainability, we look at carbon footprints and attempt to measure them . Therefore, once beginning this journey, it is recommended to baseline your organization’s current carbon footprint. You need to be able to track your scope 1 emissions, data center energy consumption as well as e-waste. The goal being a substantial and significant reduction in all measures. Sounds easy doesn’t it?
The second step on this journey is to set targets and commit to measuring them. Last but not least, after mastering these first two steps it is recommended to begin optimizing and committing to long term sustainability.
The solution
How could you attain your sustainability goals and how could we help you ?
The answer to most current IT related questions seems to be Cloud but when it comes to environmental sustainability cloud computing platforms provided by hiperscalers like Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure may indeed provide unique benefits over on-prem infrastructure. Typically hiperscalers run in much more efficient datacenters with an average PUE of 1.3 (contrast that with an average PUE of 1.5-1.8 for on-prem). Hiperscalers are on average also better on re-using their IT assets leading to less e-waste. As such, moving your on-prem (virtual) tape infrastructure to cloud based object storage can be an easy and cost effective way to not only modernize your mainframe backup/restore architecture but also drive home tangible sustainability improvements.
Model9 and your path to sustainability
As a software based solution, Model9 does not require any other hardware such as FICON directors etc. to connect to a cloud object storage hence further simplifying the architecture and reducing e-waste and energy consumption.
Model9’s solutions integrate well with Cloud hyperscalers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, which run more efficient data centers with less e-waste. Moving virtual tape infrastructure to cloud-based object storage can drive sustainability improvements while reducing costs. Model9 does not require additional hardware, and its graphical user interface simplifies data protection administration, reducing dependence on SMEs and allowing for employees from other platforms to take on administration roles. Modernizing the data center can help lower operating costs by up to 40% in self-managed environments while providing immutability protection against cyber-attacks.
Model9 Manager provides data backup protection and archive with automatic recall for mainframe environments. Manager can replace secondary tape storage and decades old data protection solutions such as DFSMShsm, CA-Disk and BMC FDR/ABR. Manager can also eliminate tape management software such as DFSMSrmm, CA-1, TLMS, Control_T and Zara.
Model9 Shield provides a solution for mainframe cyber threat protection and business resumption that enables z/OS customers to create highly secure, off-platform backup copies of both disk and tape mainframe data and quickly recover it in the event of an attack.
Model9 Gravity transfers mainframe data to object storage in the cloud and then transforms it into open formats for use in cloud applications. It’s the only solution that eliminates proprietary data silos without consuming mainframe CPU or requiring changes to your mainframe applications.
About the author
