IT Infrastructure and Data Center Sustainability: VMware Unveils Carbon Emissions Explorer Dashboard

Enterprise and cloud software provider VMware has introduced a new carbon emissions explorer dashboard for VMware Aria Operations. Armed with the dashboard, customers can monitor and reduce their IT infrastructure's carbon footprint, the company said.

The dashboard -- according to Lakshmikanth Mathur, Raajeev Kalyanaraman and Luke Huckaba -- provides customers with "detailed insights into their carbon footprint at various levels, from vCenter down to individual virtual machines." Among the capabilities the company noted:

• Real-time trend analysis of carbon emissions;
• visibility into data centers and their associated carbon footprints;
• identification of top-performing and underperforming clusters based on power consumption; and
• the ability to identify oversized virtual machines and clusters, and then right-size them.

The new carbon emissions explore dashboard complements the out of the box VMware Aria Operations sustainability dashboards, the company said.

The company did not say whether the dashboard is multi-tenant for partners and IT service providers.

VMware Sustainability Strategy: Office of the CTO Involved

Within and across the enterprise software market, the company has been one of the most vocal proponents of sustainable IT strategies. Much of the effort involves VMware's office of the CTO, which coordinates innovation and sustainability activities.

In a blog about the sustainability journey, VMware CTO Kit Colbert said the company:

• Began the journey back in 1998 with its first virtualization solutions—reducing the infrastructure required to run workloads and cut data center emissions.
• Achieved carbon neutrality in 2018 and recently began engaging our partners and suppliers to follow suit.
• Committed to science-based targets and are working towards net-zero emissions by 2030.

In the first half of 2023, more than 300 individuals from across the company attended a first-ever Sustainable Software Development Workshop (SSDW). Among the software developments partners should note: Green Score, a metric VMware's Aria Operations software. Green score was introduced in 2022 to assess the environmental impact of VMware infrastructure in a data center. 

VMware Sustainability Milestones

Additional VMware sustainability milestones inclide:

• July 2023: VMware published its 2023 ESG report.
• April 2023: The company unveiled VMware Cross-Cloud managed services, a "set of prescriptive offers with enhanced partner and customer benefits that will enable highly skilled partners to expand their managed services practices." BT, for one, plans to offer the managed services to "help customers innovate, address data sovereignty requirements, and reduce operational costs while focusing on sustainability," according to Colin Bannon, CTO at Business, BT.
• February 2023: The company joined the European Green Digital Coalition (EGDC). The group -- spanning nearly 40 IT companies -- is supported by the European Commission, the European Parliament and a number of corporate partners, with the aim of harnessing the emission-reducing potential of digital solutions, the EGDC said.

True believers in VMware's sustainability strategy include  Copaco, a distributor of cloud services to partners across Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Indeed, Copaco embraced the VMware Zero Carbon Committed Initiative. Pascal Saul, senior cloud architect at Copaco, explained the strategy to CIO.com.

Sustainability: What's Next?

Looking ahead, it's safe to expect the company to discuss sustainability during the VMware Explore 2023 conference -- which is scheduled for August 21-24 in Las Vegas. The conference will feature roughly one-dozen sessions focused on sustainability and green IT strategies.

Also of note: VMware will likely have a new owner before the end of 2023. Indeed, Broadcom is preparing to close the $61 billion acquisition of VMware within the next few weeks. U.S. regulators are still reviewing the deal.