As companies find themselves facing a mandate to innovate in critical areas like artificial intelligence, they have an opportunity to get their IT environment ready for the era of AI, while also reducing their environmental impact.

Moving workloads to the public cloud can improve their carbon footprint significantly because major public cloud providers such as Microsoft invest heavily in datacenter sustainability and renewable energy. But for hybrid cloud workloads, decision-makers face the challenge of determining how to bolster efficiency and overall sustainability in their own environments.

“The benefits that companies look for as they modernize their infrastructure are often better performance, security and management capability,” says Omar Khan, general manager of Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Product Marketing. “But more and more companies are prioritizing sustainability, so they are also really paying attention to how infrastructure modernization affects that.”

A Great Opportunity for a Changing World

Improvements to IT platforms can have an outsized impact on sustainability because companies’ own facilities tend to waste lots of energy, says Jonathan Koomey, president and founder, Koomey Analytics. A big reason for that, he says, is on-premises infrastructure often gets underutilized—with equipment sometimes sitting idle 90% of the time or more while still consuming power around the clock. “That means everything from carbon emissions to energy use to costs per computation are typically much higher for on-premises datacenters than in the public cloud,” he says.

That’s one of the reasons Microsoft developed Azure Arc—a hybrid cloud solution that extends the Azure platform to allow businesses to seamlessly run and manage workloads across datacenters, at the edge and in a multicloud environment. By using it, organizations gain insights into where apps are deployed, where data is stored, and how resources are utilized, to make informed decisions about where workload and infrastructure modernization is needed most.

Using Azure Arc as part of their modernization journey, companies can bring Azure to their SQL Server environments, unlocking data silos that can exist with on-premises. Modernization also paves the way for organizations to prepare their environments for other critical initiatives, including generative AI. And Azure Arc can be that stepping stone to modernize an organization’s data and the infrastructure it lives on.

“Hybrid cloud gives organizations the agility to place workloads wherever it makes sense, responding to business challenges and allowing the company to make highly informed decisions,” says Christine McMonigal, director of hyperconverged marketing at Intel.

Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure like Azure Stack HCI gives companies the visibility they need to make smarter decisions and reduce on-premises power consumption, while delivering the capabilities to power innovation with transformative technologies like AI. The hybrid cloud solution provides hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), combining virtualized computing, software-defined storage and networking into each server, with the servers clustered into a pool of virtualized resources. Beyond providing a much smaller overall IT footprint by eliminating some equipment, HCI is also more energy efficient in other ways.

“Companies that adopt HCI are often moving from older infrastructure, so they’re gaining efficiency simply by moving forward several generations of technology,” McMonigal says. “And they’re able to run the same workloads on fewer servers. People have told me it took two racks of equipment before, but now they can do it on half a rack of HCI.”

Khan concurs. “When customers move workloads from a legacy platform to a hyperconverged one enabled through Azure Arc, they typically see at least 30% to 40% better efficiency, so they’re able to run higher performance workloads and, on the flipside, realize more savings on a cost and energy basis,” he says.

For example, SSP Group, a U.K.-based global leader in food and beverage services for travelers, was able to reduce processing times by 50% and is on track to save more than 100,000 kilowatt hours per year by moving its on-premises infrastructure to Azure Stack HCI. “We have challenging sustainability goals for the next few years,” says Francisco Castillo, head of infrastructure at SSP. “Architecture that significantly reduces power consumption is really valuable, and we got that with Azure Stack HCI.”

Moreover, the 4th Gen of Intel Xeon Scalable processors includes a new Optimized Power Mode, engineered to provide an automatic power savings of up to 20% for selected workloads whenever they are not running at peak usage and with a negligible performance impact.

Intel has been investing in innovation in virtualization for seven generations and was one of the original tech leaders for container technology, giving customers greater flexibility and data portability. “Basing an infrastructure on Intel technologies with Azure Stack HCI enables more seamless interoperability to be able to move and place those workloads across your private or public cloud instances wherever it makes the most sense,” McMonigal adds.

Many Benefits

Modernization of the IT environment can open the door to new opportunities for innovation as organizations unlock the value of the data across all platforms, such as by bringing sophisticated AI capabilities to on-premises environments. Azure Arc-enabled machine learning (ML), for example, is a solution that allows IT teams to manage ML workloads across hybrid and multicloud environments, whether on-premises, on the public cloud or at the edge. Organizations can also train their models in the cloud with Azure, and with Azure Arc, bring those models to their on-premises environment.

Implementing AI at scale, while lowering cost and risk, is challenging for many organizations. Intel and Microsoft are helping address this challenge. The current and previous generations of Intel Xeon Scalable processors have included a built-in accelerator designed specifically for AI inference, so you can run complex AI workloads on the same clusters as existing workloads. This enables enterprises to scale AI across different workloads, and hybrid and edge environments, making the most of their data to derive faster insights. Integrated AI accelerators consume much less power than discrete hardware as well.

Many companies that use a significant amount of on-premises infrastructure have an IT environment that’s highly distributed—such as a large manufacturer or retailer that collects data at every site. Those types of businesses often have an especially hard time managing utilization.

Microsoft’s Azure Arc can offer advantages to those businesses because it provides visibility into utilization and consumption across the entire IT estate.

Ultimately, Khan says, Azure Arc essentially brings many of the benefits of cloud to on-premises environments. “For those workloads that do have to remain on-prem, Arc gives companies that consistent management experience, so they can take full advantage of a sustainable platform through Intel, but still get that great visibility and mobility.”

Learn more about how Microsoft Azure Arc, accelerated by Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, can increase the efficiency and sustainability of on-premises infrastructure.