Building more power-efficient IT

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As we accelerate the era of artificial intelligence, the need for compute-intensive infrastructure has never been greater. Enterprises across every industry are exploring how best to leverage AI, while also weighing the best IT infrastructure options. While the desire to invest in AI-driven innovations and machine learning is strong, enterprises must also focus on power efficiencies and the impact of IT on their overall carbon footprint.

Achieving both power and efficiency starts with taking some practical steps. Upgrading to the latest generation of servers allows for consolidation of existing workloads. In short, you can handle more workloads and more data on fewer servers than ever before.

More value – fewer servers

Consolidating incumbent data center infrastructure with newer, more efficient servers can help accelerate business outcomes while also balancing performance, cost, and IT sustainability. Take the latest HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers. These can significantly improve performance over previous generations while requiring less physical rack space. A single HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 server can replace up to seven HPE ProLiant Gen10 units, providing up to 65% power savings per year*.

This kind of infrastructure consolidation allows enterprises to increase compute power while reducing the carbon footprint. While this is not a simple, linear relationship, focusing on equipment efficiency helps each piece of technology deliver the most work possible with the least energy consumption and heat generation.

Keep your cool

While hardware consolidation represents a major opportunity for enterprises to improve efficiency, the anatomy of that hardware can also have a significant impact. High performance computing platforms generate significant heat, so more efficient cooling is vital to design and implementation.

Dissipating heat is a perennial challenge for both enterprise IT manufacturers and data centers. Data centers and their infrastructure consume significant amounts of power to stay cool, making them costly to run. Using efficient and effective cooling methods can reduce power consumption and, in turn, reduce the environmental impact of IT infrastructure.

Security as a strategy

Modern enterprise environments are more complex and vulnerable than ever, and legacy infrastructure can’t keep pace with rising AI, hybrid, and compliance demands.

This paper explores how embedded, lifecycle-based security—from silicon to software—helps organizations reduce risk, simplify compliance, and build resilient infrastructure that turns security into a strategic advantage.

Flexibility = new levels of efficiency

Adopting an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model allows enterprises to scale their IT infrastructure up and down as required, ensuring that you always have the compute and storage resources you need, while never paying for services that are not being fully utilized.

HPE GreenLake provides enterprises with this level of flexibility, minimizing the overprovisioning issues that have traditionally resulted in bloated IT costs and wasted power consumption. And, since that flexibility goes both ways, there will always be IT resources available whenever enterprises need to run heavier workloads than normal.

You can go further by rethinking your data center design. HPE Advisory and Professional Services can partner with you to create and implement a data center strategy that goes beyond upgrading to the latest servers. This can encompass a full data center facility roadmap to optimize your data center or datacenter, regardless of size and location.  

Additionally, consider thinking outside the warehouse-sized box: forward-thinking companies are already shifting to modular-based data center facilities. These allow enterprises to quickly scale to meet demand, which makes more sense than ever as business shifts to high-density AI workloads. For one such example, read how HPE customer Thésée Datacenter created a “data center designed for tomorrow.”

HPE Sustainability Insight Center

IT sustainability requires more than efficient infrastructure, it demands continuous, data-driven insight. The HPE Sustainability Insight Center allows customers to track the carbon footprint associated with their HPE IT infrastructure. Online dashboards visualize the carbon emissions, energy consumption, and energy costs of an enterprise’s IT estate, while also providing historical data. This provides the information your team needs to enable informed decision making to help achieve IT sustainability goals.

While it may initially seem incongruous for enterprises to increase their compute power and work on their sustainability goals, it’s far from impossible. There are lots of options, from investing in the right IT infrastructure that marries performance with efficiency, to adopting a cloud-based IaaS solution that scales with the needs of your organization. The key is choosing the right partner, and with HPE at the cutting edge of performance, efficiency and flexibility, that shouldn’t be a hard decision to make.

*A note on performance claims