Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has previewed a sustainability dashboard on the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform and a portfolio of sustainability services.

The offerings, which span technology, services, financing, and asset upcycling programmes, are designed to help organisations reduce the carbon footprint associated with their IT estates.

“Achieving sustainability targets in a hybrid IT environment can be complex and daunting,” says Sandile Dube, country manager of HPE South Africa. “HPE breaks down this complexity with technologies and services that enable organisations to advance from strategy and design to operations and positive impact. Our unique, comprehensive approach helps customers transform sustainability initiatives from incremental pockets of activity to a holistic approach spanning every IT domain.”

According to Gartner, 86% of business leaders see sustainability as an investment which protects their organisation from disruption. In turn, four out of five leaders indicated that sustainability helped their organisation to optimise and reduce costs, and 83% also indicated their sustainability programme activities directly created both short- and long-term value for their organisation.

Organisations of all sizes have announced plans to reach their sustainability targets but making progress towards those goals is not simple. Challenges often include lack of visibility and metrics, a shortage of specialised expertise, and an escalating and complex regulatory environment. In fact, the greatest hurdle for South African CEOs in delivering their ESG strategy over the next three years is identifying and measuring key metrics.

To help organisations monitor, observe, and reduce their energy consumption within their IT estate, HPE will offer a new sustainability dashboard on the HPE GreenLake platform that delivers key insights on IT energy consumption, carbon emissions, and electricity costs. The dashboard will leverage advanced analytics from the HPE portfolio across compute, storage, and networking to improve overall sustainability performance.

Technology from OpsRamp, which HPE acquired in May 2023, will provide additional sustainable IT capabilities to the dashboard by delivering a unified approach to manage multi-vendor infrastructure and application resources in hybrid and multi-cloud IT environments. The sustainability dashboard, which is currently being previewed with select clients, will help move organisations from the ideation and design stages of sustainable modernisation into operations.

Sustainable modernisation starting from the workload

To support organisations on their transformation journey, HPE delivers a workload-in approach, using an array of tools and processes, to address environmental and sustainability goals and efficiently plan for modernisation. The enhanced sustainability services include two new capabilities that bridge technology and data centre facility solutions to offer an analysis of an organisation’s overall consumption.

New sustainability baselining services provide a clear picture of energy usage and emissions within their IT estate by considering commonly accepted accounting and reporting principles.

Customers also now have access to the newly enhanced HPE Right Mix Advisor a process used to identify application modernisation and hosting requirements. Its new capabilities allow HPE to build an analysis of workload power consumption and calculate carbon footprint, collectively, or at the application level. This process is paired with the redesigned HPE Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework to enable support of sustainable IT goals in an organisation’s operating model.

Sustainable IT operations reduce carbon footprint

Additional new capabilities include services and solutions to gain visibility, control, and management capabilities of an organisation’s IT and data centre carbon footprint.

Operational services that provide customers with a continuum of sustainability features including access to dedicated experts, asset upcycling services, customised Circular Economy Reports, and access to additional certifications.

Education is an additional layer of operational coverage and is supported with the refreshed HPE Digital Learner – an online learning subscription service that now includes sustainable upskilling for IT and data centre facility employees. Customers can now offer their employees access to the ITIL 4 certificate: Sustainability in Digital and IT and the EPI Certified Data Centre Environmental Sustainability Specialist (CDESS) certifications directly from HPE.

Expanding the ‘Force for Good’ programme to SMBs

The HPE Financial Services Force for Good Financing Programme, announced earlier this year, rewards organisations that demonstrate a measurable commitment to sustainability. HPE is expanding the programme to include additional industry-recognised standard indexes, which increases the number of small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) eligible for the programme.