At OpenText World 2024 in Las Vegas, the company showed off its Titanium X architecture. Phase 7 of the roll-out was announced at the show, with two more phases to come. What is interesting is how the company is breaking with tradition and looking at new ways to use technology and data.
Enterprise Times spoke with Stephen Ludlow, SVP Software Engineering, ITOM at OpenText, to find out about one such change. The CMDB is a piece of technology that is often misused and underused in many IT departments. Most people see it as key to asset management, but IT is often the only user of it. What assets do we have? Where are they?
One change that we’ve seen in recent years has been the move from asset management to becoming a part of the IT security toolset. Teams now use it to identify devices in order to apply updates and even patches for vulnerabilities.
However, Ludlow introduced a whole new range of thought around the CMDB when on stage in the morning keynote.
The CMDB as a tool for sustainability
Ludlow’s demonstration showed OpenText’s ability to identify all its devices worldwide. It’s not an especially easy feat because that means using a mix of agent and agentless technology. However, of more interest was how the company is now looking at the metadata it has on objects in different ways. With over 500,000 assets in its current CMDB, the company holds a lot of data.
Traditionally, that metadata would provide details like location, age, use, what it was assigned to and what was running on it. From the IT department’s perspective, the workload on the device can be considered against its power usage. That will enable it to decide if the asset is needed or if the workload can be best moved elsewhere. It will also allow OpenText to decide when it is time to replace an asset with something more efficient.
Additionally, the company is adding a module that will provide financial profiles of assets. It draws on the metadata stored in the CMDB. Taking the power usage, it can now calculate a device’s carbon footprint.
Calculating the carbon footprint
That calculation of the carbon footprint is extremely interesting. In Ludlow’s presentation, he demonstrated how the company can look at a data centre and its total power usage. It can then look at where that power comes from, coal, oil, nuclear, or renewables, and create an accurate carbon footprint of the facility. Using analytics, it is possible to determine the carbon footprint of a single asset and even the workload.
This opens up several routes to utilise that information. OpenText can determine whether it is time to move a workload to a more efficient location to reduce its carbon footprint. It also manages private clouds for its customers. The natural extrapolation of having this data is that it can offer customers the opportunity to better align their IT consumption with their sustainability goals.
For a company whose CEO talks about being nature-positive, this is a significant shift in the conversation over carbon footprint. This means that the organisation can give itself and its customers a level of granularity over carbon usage that is currently unparalleled across the IT industry.
But are customers ready to take that on? Ludlow said, “The initial challenge for many organizations, is to simply report on it.” He believes that too many organisations still consider carbon saving a check box.
It also gives OpenText a position to deal with regulatory challenges. Much of the efficiency gains in data centres over the last two decades have come from new generations of hardware. As regulators cracked down on energy and water consumption of data centres, those efficiencies allowed the industry to meet targets.
The impact of AI
The growth of AI clusters, however, changes that. They are hugely power-consuming, and there is no sign of efficiency that will lower their impact on energy consumption. It is forcing regulators to look again at what targets they should be setting for data centres.
What OpenText has here is the ability to stay ahead of any new regulations for the industry. The big energy costs for AI are in the initial creation of LLMs. Over time, the power needs are lower. Being able to calculate the carbon footprint of specific workloads, allows the company to move AI workloads to different locations to meet cost and carbon targets.
This also fits in with its approach to AI. Rather than move customer data to the AI, it brings the AI to the customer. This level of insight could then allow it to give the customer detailed costing for AI projects that they don’t have today. With many organisations unable to put a detailed or even realistic cost on AI as part of their ROI calculation, this is a detail many will welcome.
However, while it is possible, Ludlow said, “We have not comprehensively yet started to look at taking out carbon or moving workloads around due to its carbon emissions. We’re at the visibility level but not at the action level currently.”
Financial savings
The financial savings here are about far more than just carbon footprint. The ability to retire old and inefficient hardware will lower costs. Identifying underutilised rotational disk storage means that data and workloads can be moved to more efficient hardware.
More importantly, the AI journey that OpenText is on opens the door to advanced modelling that would provide customers and the company with the ability to model the placement of workload based on cost and carbon footprint. Again, this is far beyond where the industry is today in terms of detailed insight.
Helping the company reduce cost
Of even more interest, is that this aligns heavily with the announcement from the company that it intends to take $1 billion in cost out of its operations budget over the next decade. The areas where this has an impact are:
- Systems, tools and hardware rationalisation – $375M
- Datacentre consolidation and cloud optimisation – $160M
Together, these two areas account for over half of that projected savings. Utilising the data already held in the CMDB makes it easier to see how the company can achieve its goals. More importantly, the benefits for its customers are just as large, suggesting a potential for productising this new module and any associated AI and analytics components.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
The CMDB has always been an underappreciated and poorly used piece of technology. It is finally coming into its own through the increased attention on understanding assets and cybersecurity.
What is interesting here is the plan to make much better use of the metadata stored in the CMDB to drive sustainability and lower costs. This is still in its infancy at OpenText, and there has been no announcement of its use in sustainability. However, Ludlow’s demonstration and mention of a financial module means this won’t be far away.
Importantly, with a CEO focused on being nature-positive, it can’t be long before the company announces this as an add-on.
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