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Sustainability is at the forefront of everyone’s mind, from students learning about hydroponics in school, to families wanting to reduce energy costs, and everyone wanting to protect the natural resources we have now for our future. But this is not limited to individuals, families, local, or regional efforts. Companies, states, governments, and countries are all trying to reduce their carbon footprints. According to a recent report by Gartner, sustainability focus is on the rise, with 52% saying that environmentally friendly choices are helping to drive business growth and provide a differentiator to their competition, and 29% reporting that it’s helping to create a strategic value through industry partnerships1.
We know that you have the same concerns. We do too. That’s why, in February 2023, we announced our plans to put sustainability management in your hands with the NetApp® BlueXP™ sustainability dashboard.
Well, guess what… the wait is over!
Start getting green!
The BlueXP sustainability dashboard is LIVE!!!
As you have heard, the BlueXP sustainability dashboard delivers visibility, insights, and guidance to improve your sustainability posture. It enables you to reduce energy consumption across your NetApp ONTAP® systems, allowing you to work towards reaching your environmental goals, aligning your storage systems with eco-friendly practices, and achieve your corporate sustainability goals.
To meet your needs, the sustainability dashboard provides you with a wide range of reporting on such items as power, carbon, and heat. The dashboard also delivers your sustainability score, which is an assessment of how well you are leveraging key features, services, and best practices towards improving sustainability. The score enables you to track your progress towards your goals.
The sustainability score is also available at your system level. The data helps determine which working environments, or clusters, would benefit from implementing provided recommendations, like moving to more efficient storage, to achieve the right balance between performance and power consumption.
You benefit from gained visibility and insights, with actionable recommendations and guided remediation to improve your sustainability posture, including:
- Lower storage costs
- Reduce carbon footprint
- Improve energy efficiency
We listened. We heard. And customers agree!
“This is great! It gives us visibility that we’ve never had before.”
Where’s the data buried?
Getting all this data is great, right? But where does it come from? That’s what’s great about BlueXP. It’s connected to the specific data sources needed to deliver you your sustainability details. As a unified control plane that delivers an integrated unified experience across storage and data services, BlueXP pulls data from AutoSupport® telemetry service, NetApp Active IQ® digital advisor, ONTAP, and Cloud Insights into this comprehensive dashboard.
To achieve the best results from the dashboard, AutoSupport must be enabled. It provides detailed information based on your specific infrastructure. If AutoSupport is not enabled, the statistics will be based on product specifications. To gain real-time power details, Cloud Insights needs to be enabled.
What system sustainability details are reported?
So, now you know what all is reported in the dashboard, but which NetApp systems are included in the details? The BlueXP sustainability dashboard reports power, thermal, carbon, and energy details on NetApp ONTAP systems including NetApp AFF, both A-series and C-series, and NetApp FAS storage environments. Conveniently, all these systems are managed through BlueXP, making it easy to implement recommendations.
The nitty-gritty
Let’s dive deeper into the components of the BlueXP sustainability dashboard, starting with the sustainability score.
As stated above, “Sustainability score” is an assessment of where you currently stand with regards to leveraging the key features, services, and best practices that can improve the environmental sustainability of your NetApp ONTAP storage systems. Your score over the previous five 5 weeks is shown, enabling you to see the impact of changes to your carbon mitigation percentages and implementation of recommended actions. You can also hover over the graph to see the factors that lead to increases or decreases in your score.
The “Environmental indicators” deliver projections for power, direct carbon usage, and heat over a month, quarter, or annual basis. The direct carbon usage will change based on changes in your “Carbon mitigation percentages”. These percentages are site specific and reflect the baseline values based for each location. You can adjust these figures, to meet changes made to use renewable, alternative, and other energy resources to off-set direct carbon utilization.
One of the very valuable benefits of the BlueXP sustainability dashboard is the intelligent insights that generate recommended actions to improve your overall posture, ranging from compaction to deduplication, from compression to caching and tiering, plus more. These recommended actions are delivered based on category and working environment (cluster). The “Recommended actions” tab lists the actions by category, presenting you the option to “Fix” it now, which will initiate guided remediation to address the recommendation, or “Later”, which moves the recommendation to the “Actions for later” tab. These actions will be postponed for 30 days, then automatically move back to “Recommended actions.”
If you want to address the recommendations at a system level, the BlueXP sustainability dashboard “Working environments” table lists each cluster with multiple tab headers that are customizable. You decide what you want to see by score, heat, direct CO2, total capacity, watts by TiB, and more. This table can be exported to a CSV format report. The same options to “Fix” or “Later” are available for each action as mentioned above.
So, now what?
Now you know what’s new and available with your BlueXP sustainability dashboard, and how your actions directly affect and improve your ONTAP sustainability posture. So, what else do you need to know? First, BlueXP and its sustainability dashboard are free and available right now. Second, you will achieve the best results with AutoSupport enabled. And third, BlueXP enables you to manage your environment and sustainability from its unified control plane with operational simplicity.
How do you get started, you ask? That’s easy! Sign into BlueXP with your NetApp Support Site login. The BlueXP sustainability dashboard is available on in the left rail menu under “Governance.” Just like that, you are ready to manage your sustainability posture!
