Inside VMware’s Inaugural Sustainable Software Development Workshop

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / May 25, 2023 / VMware

Foto: Accesswire

In-person attendees pose for a group photo during VMware's inaugural Sustainable Software Development Workshop. (Photo courtesy of Pranay Pareek)

VMware solutions have offered intrinsic sustainability since the company's inception. Virtualization is known for reducing the infrastructure needed to run workloads along with the energy and carbon footprint of the data center. Today, sustainability is a long-term commitment at VMware and a top priority for our customers. While we're proud of the progress we've made, we need to do more, especially to meet the growing demand for compute-intensive technologies like machine learning.

At the end of Earth Month and just before the annual R&D Innovation Offsite (RADIO), 300 individuals from across VMware came together for the company's first-ever Sustainable Software Development Workshop (SSDW). The Sustainable Software Development Workshop (SSDW) was created to bring together individuals from different areas of the company to explore how VMware can further integrate sustainability into its products and services. This is a rapidly growing space, and together, we not only explored the challenges and opportunities that exist today but laid the foundation for impactful and innovative progress toward future sustainable software development.

First, defining sustainable software

To VMware, sustainable software is about building, managing, and running any workloads (on-prem, multi-cloud, telco cloud, or edge cloud) in a way that minimizes the environmental impact. Examples include:

• Core solutions that can help customers advance their decarbonization goals by reducing per workload power consumption. This can be achieved by implementing vSphere host power management, enabling migration to a more energy-efficient data center, reducing the number of physical servers, and reclaiming unused virtual machines (VMs) with Aria Operations.
• The Green Score, a metric introduced last year in Aria Operations, was introduced to assess the environmental impact of VMware infrastructure in a data center. The Green Score considers various factors such as workload efficiency, resource utilization, virtualization rate, power source, and hardware efficiency, delivering a score ranging from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating greener supply, learner operations, and cleaner demand. This allows data center administrators to identify areas for improvement and optimize their infrastructure for sustainability.
• Deep Cooling is a software solution that uses AI and big data to optimize cooling in data centers. By analyzing operation metrics, data from the dynamic environment, and energy usage, Deep Cooling dynamically adjusts cooling parameters to reduce energy consumption and costs, saving 18% - 25% of electricity for cooling. In addition, the system requires minimal changes to data center hardware and does not negatively impact normal production during the implementation process.

"It's not just enlightening to hear the collective voices and ideas from this event, but inspiring to know that sustainability innovation is so important, to so many at VMware"