To drive the next generation of technological advancements, VMware’s Director of Sustainability Innovation Nicola Peill-Moelter says sustainability innovation has to move faster. And we've got to kill the zombies — zombie servers, that is.

“The writing's on the wall with the fires in California, the increased storms, flooding etc.,” Peill-Moelter said during a VMworld session. “I think it's almost literally and figuratively lit a fire under people. They recognize that climate change is not something that's going to happen in 2100, it's not something that’s going to happen for their grandchildren, but it's something that's happening in the here and now, and we don’t have a lot of time to take action.”

A lot of work has gone into sustainable innovation of data centers in the last decade, said Victor Firoiu, senior staff academic research lead at VMware, citing low-power hardware and software virtualization as examples. Be that as it may, these technologies are believed to have reached the threshold of their performance within research and industry communities. 

“Basically the low hanging fruit has been picked,” Firoiu said. “And that now we need a second evolution in the sustainability of computation.”

The last decade of technology has been able to offset energy and production efficiencies in both hardware and data centers, however, “we're starting to lose that,” Peill-Moelter explained. Workloads are growing and demanding equipment to be more productive if it is to offset and reduce the amount of IT infrastructure, Peill-Moelter explained.

This is what Firoiu referred to as the first-generation of sustainable computing, where the focus was on improving the efficiency of data centers outside of the application. According to Firoiu, now the problem must address that sustainability improvement leap from the inside. 

“Everybody in the technical software development community has been focused on increasing productivity, and making software go faster from idea to development to deployment to production maintenance,” he added.

To this end, VMware and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) recently launched a $6 million digital infrastructure sustainability research initiative calling on academic research groups to present a new generation of innovation to clean up IT’s digital footprint. 

What is buried and forgotten but still burning a hole in enterprises’ pockets? Zombie virtual machines (VMs) and servers.

Assets that were once deployed with a purpose and finish or fulfill their mission become zombies when they continue to run without being repurposed for productive workloads. 

Much like Hollywood zombies, these comatose devices typically operate with zero oversight, and quite literally suck the life out of power efficiency, creating environmental and capital resource problems, along with tying up CPU, storage, and memory.

“We're not talking about excess capacity or under utilization, these are assets that just aren't being used, they are long forgotten, and they also have security implications as well for an organization,” Peill-Moelter explained. “And VMware is perfectly positioned to solve this problem because we're in the guts of the machine and we can see the activity of both the host machine and the virtual machines.” 

VMware is working to cure zombie servers and VMs by helping organizations repurpose compute resources for productive workloads to maximize productivity with less IT infrastructure, she added. 

The pace of change is happening fast, but "VMware can show the business value of sustainability innovation that can help us go faster and scale, much more quickly," Peill-Moelter said.

This is especially true as VMware’s customers are large enterprises running corporate data centers that account for a very significant part of the world’s emissions.

Virtualization holds promise for sustainable green growth in its ability to consolidate applications from multiple applications to one server and reduce energy usage. In fact, according an IDC study, VMware virtualization cut over 1.5 billion megawatt hours (MWh) in power consumption and 758 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from entering the atmosphere between 2003 to 2019. 

Nevertheless, the global power draw of all data centers —  which encompasses 1% to 1.5% of worldwide electricity production — still presents a dim and desolate future without sustainable innovation in digital infrastructure to flatten the energy curve.