DC Scope – a software to reduce IT energy, by measuring and analyzing in real-time CO2 emissions of servers and virtual machines
Country of development/application:
France
Scope of innovation
☐ Office work
☒ Production / Service supply process
Sector-specific
☒ Yes / please, specify sector(s): IT
☐ No (relevant for all sectors)
Description of the needs
The threat of climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. To reach the Paris Agreement targets, PWC estimates that the world economy must reduce its carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions per dollar of income by 6.3% per year until year 2100. At the same time, ICT has drastically changed the way we lead our lives, as well as how societies and economies function. It’s often claimed that ICT has the potential to help reduce CO2e emissions, but has it started to deliver on this promise?
There are three major ways in which ICT can be expected to affect CO2e emissions. The direct effects are mainly caused by energy consumption in production, distribution and use of ICT. Estimates of the direct effects of the global ICT sector amount to 1.4% of overall global CO2e emissions .
The indirect effects of the global ICT sector relate to the impact that ICT has on other sectors of the economy. It is estimated that ICT could help reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6-15% by 2030 through smart applications, the increasingly efficient use of energy and dematerialization (that is, digital solutions that replace more energy-intensive solutions).
The third major way that ICT affects CO2e emissions is related to the fact that new technologies cause changes in behavior. As ICT becomes cheaper and more available, we tend to consume more of it. Thus there is a risk that the potential reductions from indirect emissions-reducing effects could be cancelled out by changes in consumer behavior and actually lead to greater energy consumption and therefore greater emissions. This is called the rebound effect.
With DC Scope, organizations can involve IT services in the company’s social responsibility actions: it can measure, understand and reduce the CO2 emissions of IT services. DC Scope® is a solution to monitor in real-time the CO2 emissions of IT services, virtual machines, and servers. The solution helps to reduce CO2 emissions at the beginning of the global IT energy production chain, generating a high impact in the different stages (cascade effect) of energy produced to power servers and boosts the awareness of the environmental impact inside organizations, involving teams from management, operations, technical, etc. in the measurement and evaluation of CO2 emissions.
Description of the solution
DC Scope® allows customer to manage his vSphere infrastructure without complexity. It enhances the visibility over customer’s data center, provides key data to increase the efficiency of his servers and enrich the decision making by providing real information about the behavior of customer’s virtual machines.
From its intuitive interface, the customer can monitor his virtual machines, detect anomalies in his servers, follow the distribution of costs in his data centers, and more. The solution allows the customer to easily anticipate the need for resources and to simulate the addition of workloads and resources to his infrastructure.
Key features:
• MONITOR
DC Scope® collects, stores, and analyses the most relevant metrics of customer’s infrastructure. It identifies issues that affect the performance of his virtual machines, servers, datastores, and datacenters. With the help of DC Scope® logs and graphs on-demand, the customer can then go back in time to check the status of his infrastructure at any particular time.
• OPTIMIZATION
DC Scope® analyses the behavior of infrastructure and provides customer with recommendations to improve the performance and reduce the waste of resources. It will help customer optimize his virtual machines, servers and clusters by guiding him through the process of deletion, resizing or consolidation of elements. DC Scope® will help customer reclaim IT resources, improve datacenter efficiency and save costs.
• TROUBLESHOOTING
The troubleshooting module of DC Scope® allows customer to easily identify critical issues in his infrastructure, provides him with accurate information on these issues and guides him in the process to overpass them. The troubleshooting module is intuitive, easy to use, and comprehensive. Additionally, the alerts and notifications module allows customer to define alerts not only for the metrics in his virtual machines but also in the evolution, trends, capacity planning, and other indicators in his infrastructure.
• CAPACITY PLANNING
DC Scope® helps customer make the right investment decisions and anticipate the risks and needs of his projects by analyzing the evolution and trends of growth in his infrastructure. With DC Scope® the customer can easily simulate “What if?” Scenarios to test the deletion or deployment of virtual machines, servers, or datastores in his infrastructure.
• CLOUD PRICING
With DC Scope® the customer can track the costs of virtual machines, servers, and clusters in his datacenter. This analysis will help him to understand the cost allocated, used, and wasted on his on-premise infrastructure and for each one of his clients/projects. If customer is considering the migration of his on-premises virtual machines to the public cloud, DC Scope® allows him to determine the instance and the cost in the public cloud of OVH, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
• REPORTS AND KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
The key performance indicators module of DC Scope® allows customer to track the evolution of Activity, Capacity, Costs, and Health Status of his infrastructure. Additionally, with the reporting module, the customer will be able to set up automatic reports to track detailed information about his datacenter.
• And more…
Graphs on demand, energy consumption, charge back, recommendations to resize and delete virtual machines, detailed and summarised views, Key Performance Indicators, simulations, multi-vCenters, multi-users, API support and more.
Description of the effect
There are other popular and, as claimed by the developers of DC Scope® – over-priced tools in the market which tend to add more complexity to the operations. DC Scope® has been developed from the real needs of system administrators and chief technology officers; offering the functionalities needed in the administration of the virtual machines and the direction of the infrastructure. Advantages claimed by the developers include:
• ADAPTED: DC Scope® has been developed to answer the common problems for system administrators, without adding complexity to the operations.
• INTUITIVE: no configurations are needed; DC Scope® will start collecting metrics after its installation.
• FAST RETURN ON INVESTMENT: DC Scope® allows for resizing of the virtual machines and consolidating of the servers in order to increase the efficiency of the customer’s data center.
• AFFORDABLE: DC Scope® is an affordable solution licensed per number of virtual machines in the data center.
• EASY TO INSTALL: just one Open Virtual Appliance to deploy; no need of agents on the virtual machines.
• READY TO USE: DC Scope® starts to collect metrics right after the installation and provides the analysis needed in predefined dashboards.
Environmental benefits:
• Collects metrics in real time about the consumption of resources and CO2 emissions in the datacenter, the metrics collected by the solution have the finest granularity in the market.
• Helps organizations to reduce up to 25% the environmental footprint of IT services, virtual machines and servers
Financial benefits:
• Offers a 4 to 9 months payback time.
• Up to 60% less expensive than mainstream alternatives, as the solution is easily implemented in the infrastructure, without complexity and with a simple licensing.
• Drastically reduces the amount of files, documents and time spent in managing the infrastructure by centralizing the metrics and information which can improve the productivity of IT teams by up to 50% of their time.
Company/companies that developed/implemented/offer the innovation
EasyVirt® is an innovative French company specialized in the efficiency of physical and virtual servers. The solutions offered by EasyVirt® make it easy to control and optimize virtualized infrastructures by providing in-depth analyzes of the activity and consumption of virtual machines, as well as providing the best practices to apply in each environment.
EasyVirt® provides concrete solutions for organizations in order to promote Green IT and the efficient use of IT resources. This know-how and expertise are recognized by company’s customers and stakeholders in the field.
EasyVirt® believes that virtualization is the heart of IT infrastructures. The refined know-how that the company has in this field allows it to deliver high-level software and advice to its customers. We believe that virtualization should be easy to drive, providing solutions instead of creating complexity for IT administrators.
EasyVirt SAS
Address: 2, rue Alfred Kastler, 44300 Nantes, France
E-mail: contact@easyvirt.com
Website: https://www.easyvirt.com/en/terms-of-service/
Additional information