Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) wants to help its edge-to-cloud platform customers be proactive about addressing the environmental impacts of running power-hungry data center and IT infrastructure. The vendor's Project Sustainability dashboard for GreenLake is now available in tech preview, and the application offers visibility, monitoring and management capabilities for GreenLake enterprise customers.

By monitoring energy consumption and associated carbon emissions, HPE's sustainability dashboard "is this core underpinning of data and visibility that we can provide to our customers to understand their IT estates and [their] carbon impact," Arti Garg, HPE lead sustainability architect and deputy global CTO for data and AI, told SDxCentral.

The dashboard gathers power usage telemetry from enterprise customers' operational HPE assets, based on where each asset is located. This enables accurate monitoring based on "the actual carbon intensity of the grid where the assets are operating, as opposed to using a global number," Garg noted.

It then uses that telemetry data to provide analytics and visualizations, as well as performing calculations that show enterprises three key pieces of information: total energy used to power IT assets, the carbon impact of generating that amount of electricity, and the total cost of their power use.

That final piece – cost – is important because "this is a business decision, ultimately, that [IT] directors are making," Garg said. "We're hearing that carbon is one currency. Currency is the other currency," she said, and "there's a certain amount of optimization" happening as a result.

The sustainability dashboard also outputs results in a report format, which "can be shared with others who aren't necessarily wanting to look at this through the dashboard itself," Garg explained.

Dashboard users can select a window of time to analyze a particular trend or view data as cumulative totals. The dashboard also separates data based on individual device assets and can provide specific information on each server, for example.

While HPE promises the visibility offered in this first dashboard iteration will be beneficial in sustainable IT decision-making, "over time we will certainly add more capabilities to the dashboard in terms of more advanced recommendations," Garg said.

To that point, the vendor also recognizes that its enterprise customers "don't have only HPE assets in their data center," Garg said. "If we really want to enable truly sustainable management of your data center, we have to take into consideration reality. And that's one of the areas that I think sets us apart."

While HPE claims to "have the ability to look at third-party assets," she said, "that capability is going to improve over time." But even in its current iteration, the dashboard "can provide a holistic view of your heterogeneous estate, which is something that we've heard is really important to our customers," Garg noted.