Cisco promises the combination of its Intersight infrastructure management platform and Unified Computing System (UCS) X-Series servers reduces data center energy consumption by up to 52% at a four-to-one (4:1) server consolidation rate, according to Jeremy Foster, SVP of Cisco's compute business.

Data center operators with servers and processors that are two generations old before transitioning to "the latest and greatest on UCS X" can realize a 3:1 server consolidation, which reduces the number of servers required to perform the same work by 66%; maintenance costs by 39%; the amount of software needed to maintain those environments by 27%; "and it will save you somewhere just north of 31 to 32% in the overall amount of power," Foster told SDxCentral.

But "those numbers get better" for data centers using tech that's three generations old. "You're talking a four-to-one consolidation ratio and dropping 52% power instead," he noted. And "it just goes up from there," depending on "where customers are within their lifecycle. No matter where they are, there's going to be some good cost savings, and the data center's a great place to help them start going after achieving those [environmental, social and governance] goals," he explained.

In addition to data center physical infrastructure, it's important to look at the applications running in the data center and how to sustainably modernize them. "If you're on a processor that's a couple generations old, you're literally going to bring in new things and go from a Windows 10 to a Windows 11 environment. You're going to bring in GPUs for offloading, [and] now all of a sudden, we're delivering eight-times the number of desktops from the same server on UCS X than what we were doing just a few years ago," Foster said, highlighting "an even more dramatic type of consolidation."

In the wake of growing regulatory pressures, sustainability and environmental, social and governance (ESG) topics have become more important to Cisco's customers and are sought as a competitive advantage. "[Customers] are trying to leverage sustainability [to] articulate, oftentimes, their business to the market," Foster noted.

That means sustainability innovation is heavily prioritized by the companies that rely on and those that build the technology inside data centers. "There's a good amount of innovation in the facilities," but there's also "a good amount of sustainability – certainly talk – and innovation going on. How do we cool things at a server level [and] at a switch level potentially differently and more efficiently in the future? It's really happening, I'd say, at all those levels," Foster explained.

Even though new generations of servers usually offer substantial energy efficiency improvements, "each server uses a little bit more power, and they actually require things that are going to be new methodologies, like water cooling, that we don't typically see in the enterprise data centers today," he said. And while progress is steadily being made, he expects "that big trend will happen over the next few years."

This represents a significant shift from the world of compute as it existed 10 years ago. Although organizations probably did compare, for example, the electrical utilization of one product versus another, "it wasn't something you were super worried about," Foster pointed out. But nowadays, server companies are much more focused on integrating design goals at the beginning of those processes in an attempt to build the most sustainable option on the market. "That's what drives the innovation ... in terms of how you bring things to market at a compute or device level," he said.