TOWARDS A GREENER FUTURE

TECH INNOVATIONS SHAPING THE SUSTAINABILITY AGENDA IN THE MIDDLE EAST.

There is an increasing pressure on business to be more sustainable and make their IT investments carbon-neutral. Many countries in the Middle East, including the UAE, have announced their plans to transition to a net-zero future, creating new opportunities for tech companies to develop the underpinning technologies.

Many tech majors such as Apple and Intel have unveiled ambitious plans to make their businesses carbon neutral within this decade. Apple plans to cut down emissions by 75 percent while deploying carbon removal solutions for its end-to-end business by 2030.

Intel has announced plans to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in its global operations by 2040, and to drive supplier greenhouse gas emissions reductions. The company plans to increase energy efficiency, lower the total carbon footprint of Intel products and platforms, and work with customers and industry partners to create solutions that lower the footprint of the entire technology ecosystem.

Intel’s vision is to drive continuous innovation around Sustainable Semiconductor Manufacturing. This includes driving to net-zero carbon consumption in product manufacturing, using renewable electricity sources to power its manufacturing sites, and driving to water-positive factory usage.

Intel says it will look at the entire system architecture to drive its sustainable products strategy – data centre to rack to platform to silicon – and then design products to enable optimising for sustainability throughout the system. A key innovation in this area is creating modular server where data centre operators can upgrade compute, network, and I/O. This both optimises performance as well extends the life of products resulting in less eWaste.

Intel has also announced two new investments in its continuing efforts to create more sustainable data centre technology solutions. First, Intel unveiled plans to invest more than $700 million for a 200,000-square-foot, state-of-the art research and development mega lab focused on innovative data center technologies and addressing areas such as heating, cooling and water usage. Additionally, Intel introduced the technology industry’s first open intellectual property (open IP) immersion liquid cooling solution and reference design. With the initial design proof of concept initiated in Taiwan, Intel aims to simplify and accelerate the implementation of immersion liquid cooling solutions throughout the ecosystem globally.

Ahmed Ibrahim

Another tech major Lenovo has announced various innovations in manufacturing, supply chain, and operations that are helping to make IT hardware and supply chains more sustainable and more efficient. One of Lenovo’s key solutions for improved energy efficiency is the Neptune direct water-cooling infrastructure, which offers much more efficient cooling for data centers than traditional air cooling. Neptune can remove approximately 90% of the heat from a computer or data system, thereby reducing energy consumption, increasing efficiency and improving performance.

Lenovo is also investing in the use of more sustainable materials both in hardware manufacturing and product packaging.

With tech companies having a major role in paving the path to our net-zero future, what are some of the key sustainable technology innovations to watch out for?

“New technologies are rapidly transforming all aspects of our economy, society and environment. Today, governments and businesses are leveraging advanced technologies to introduce new business models, promote sustainability, and improve the general standard of living for today’s global citizens. IoT, AI, machine learning, blockchain technology, 5G, robotics, and cloud computing are several technologies that are being leveraged in solutions to achieve these goals,” says Ahmed Ibrahim, Director, Global Business Development – Service Providers at Intel.

The biggest environmental impact from IT is the data centre, and energy consumption from data centres, says Alaa Bawab, General Manager Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), Middle East & Africa, Lenovo. Currently, around 1% of global electricity is used to power data centres and as we progress towards a world where data is projected to grow to 463 exabytes of data created every day by 2025, electricity consumption could multiply rapidly. The energy impact goes beyond just the electrical. According to a US Government report, a data centre will need on average around 1.8litres of water for every kWh consumed, predominantly for air conditioning purposes.

This means that technologies that can improve the efficiency of data centres are going to have the greatest impact. For example, proper data storage and management policies can help companies reduce the amount of redundant data or inefficient data storage, which can reduce the need for extra computing resources thereby reducing consumption of power and water, says Bawab.

“The AI spectrum is by far the most promising sustainable technology innovation when employed in association with other technologies such as IoT,” says Miguel Khouri, General Manager, GBM Abu Dhabi. “New capabilities made available by AI and IoT advancements are leading to more intelligent automation - whether in utility services, transport networks, or other sectors - and are starting to show massive benefits in minimizing energy expenditures, while also giving business leaders deeper insight into their operational performance.”

He cites the example of the sustainable impact of a Smart City approach that leverages smart sensors, 5G and Machine Learning. This can offer intelligent automated traffic control that can reduce carbon emissions substantially by predicting traffic flow and diverting traffic in real-time, to help with the smooth flow of traffic. These technologies can also provide additional benefits to city planners with regards to housing locations, consumer outlets and most importantly, the consumer supply chains that employ a large number of trucks within the city.

We cannot discuss sustainable technologies without highlighting cloud computing, as it is an essential technology that reduces emissions from small to medium companies who need IT and all the components associated with it to run their business, such as cyber-security, websites, applications’ compute and disaster recovery.

Gartner says public cloud services offer great sustainability potential with their ability to centralise IT operations and operate at scale using a shared

Alaa Bawab Miguel Khouri

Bjorn Viedge Omar Akar

service model, resulting in greater computing efficiency.

Bjorn Viedge, General Manager at ALEC Data Centre Solutions, says the demand is greater than ever for new data centres as the sheer volume of data being generated by modern enterprises grows exponentially and more businesses move to the cloud. In the region and even globally, the vast majority of data centres have racks and white spaces which are air-cooled, and is definitely not the most efficient way of cooling. In the Middle East region, this is even more pronounced given the extreme outdoor temperatures.

“This is why at ALEC Data Centre Solutions, we firmly believe in the immense value and need for liquid immersion cooling for data centres. In addition to the sustainability benefits, liquid cooling will likely become a de facto standard. With computing equipment approaching the higher end of operating parameters, and with chip densities continuing to increase, air cooling will no longer be feasible. We’re already seeing manufacturers such as Intel consider liquid cooling as an important part of new chipset designs,” he says.

What can be done to improve technology lifecycles?

According to Omar Akar, Regional Vice President, Middle East & Emerging Africa, Pure Storage, enterprises considering their own environmental impact and how they can improve the lifecycle of technology investments should focus on two key areas: engineer for a smaller footprint and develop an as-a-service approach. Corporate data centers are often still optimized for reliability, performance, or cost and less for efficiency. Old magnetic disk technologies delivered capacity yet sacrificed inefficient power usage and e-waste. Solid-state media can enable organizations to design and operate less resource-intensive data centers and can help shrink footprints dramatically, he says.

True “as-a-Service” solutions are about buying an outcome (i.e. Service Level Agreement) and having a thirdparty deliver it. “You should be able to start small, grow over time and have transparency over pricing and related KPIs, including sustainability. In storage, that requires architecture that enables technology improvements without costly and disruptive rip-and-replace projects, are capable of flexing up and down as you need, and only deploying equipment as it is required,” he adds.

Khoury from GBM says technology lifecycle management requires many aspects of the business to be considered. To improve technology lifecycles, it is essential to conduct an analysis of the business processes, mapped to the technology requirements, from applications to infrastructure, while taking into account the lifespan of those technologies from the facets of suitability, integration capabilities, administration, support and security.

“Because digital solutions are so ingrained in today’s economic fabric, it is essential that technology lifecycles are considered by both business leaders and technical innovators—neither operating in a silo. It requires in-depth knowledge of the business and IT requirements for the near future, at minimum, as well as a financial analysis that allows for the appropriate spending, to realise the full benefits to the business,” he says.

How can enterprises in the region benefit from green technologies.

Bawab from Lenovo says by adopting green technologies, organisations in the Middle East can actively contribute to the national sustainability goals and objectives and can also reap various benefits for themselves, including meeting their own corporate sustainability targets. “Many countries in the Middle East now have sustainability agendas, which pave the way towards a better, cleaner and safer environment.

“With organisations, on the other hand, the implementation of sustainable solutions can result has the biggest impact in reducing energy consumption, and therefore reducing power bills. Along with direct savings for reducing the energy to power IT systems, more efficient IT systems will consume less cooling, which means lower water bills, and less cost for facilities cooling. More efficient operating of IT systems in turn contributes towards longer life cycles, for a lower long-term operating cost.”

Viedge from ALEC sums up: “Apart from the benefits gained in the reduction of operational expenses from using low carbon emitting green technologies, organisations also stand to benefit if seeking finance. We are presently witnessing a refocusing of capital towards ESG as financial institutions, wealth funds and others have begun aligning their portfolios with net zero objectives. These organisations would also be better positioned to bid for lucrative government tenders which will no doubt prioritise businesses with green operations given how countries such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia have each announced their net zero goals for 2050 and 2060 respectively.”

TACKLING COMPLEXITY

CISCO HAS LAUNCHED APPDYNAMICS CLOUD, A CLOUD-NATIVE OBSERVABILITY PLATFORM FOR MODERN APPLICATIONS, WHICH ARE BASED ON INCREASINGLY COMPLEX, DISTRIBUTED ARCHITECTURES AND SERVICES. GREGG OSTROWSKI, EXECUTIVE CTO AT CISCO APPDYNAMICS TELLS US HOW APPDYNAMICS CLOUD HELPS TECHNOLOGISTS CUT THROUGH THE COMPLEXITY OF MANAGING HYBRID CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS AND DELIVER SEAMLESS DIGITAL USER EXPERIENCES.

Why is managing performance within cloudnative applications and architectures a business imperative today?

Digital transformation initiatives, accelerated in major part by the pandemic, led to the rapid adoption of cloud-native technologies such as microservices and Kubernetes over the last two years. These modern application architectures offer huge benefits for organisations in terms of improved speed to innovation, greater flexibility, and improved reliability.

But many IT teams are now finding themselves under immense pressure as they attempt to monitor and manage availability and performance across hugely complex cloud-native application architectures. In particular, they’re struggling to get visibility into applications and underlying infrastructure for large, managed Kubernetes environments running on public clouds.

Undoubtedly, staying on top of availability and performance is far more challenging in a software-defined cloud environment, where everything constantly changes in real-time. But digital transformation projects and innovation initiatives continue to run at break-neck speed; the heat is on for technologists to adapt and get the visibility and insight they need across these modern environments.

Why is it challenging to monitor hybrid cloud environments?

Traditional approaches to availability and performance were often based on physical infrastructure. Flashback 10 years and IT departments operated a fixed number of servers and network wires. They were dealing with constants and fixed dashboards for each layer of the IT stack. The introduction of cloud computing added a new level of complexity; organisations found themselves continually scaling up and down their use of IT based on real-time business needs.

While monitoring solutions have adapted to accommodate rising deployments of cloud, alongside traditional on-premise environments, the reality is that most were not designed to efficiently handle the dynamic and highly volatile cloud-native environments that we increasingly see today.

In the end, it’s a matter of scale. These highly distributed systems rely on thousands of containers and spawn a massive volume of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) telemetry every second. And currently, most technologists simply don’t have a way to cut through this crippling data volume and noise when troubleshooting application availability and performance problems caused by infrastructurerelated issues that span across hybrid environments.

Is that why cloud-native observability is so important now?

Yes, it is now essential for technologists to implement a cloud-native observability solution to provide observability into highly dynamic and complex cloud-native applications and technology stack.

For technologists to be able to properly understand how their applications are behaving, they need visibility across the application level, into the supporting digital services (such as Kubernetes) and into the underlying infrastructure-ascode (IaC) services (such as compute, server, database and network) they leverage from their cloud providers. But

before rushing to implement a solution to this growing challenge, there are some important factors for technologists to consider when thinking about observability into cloud environments.

They should be looking to implement a purpose-built solution that can observe distributed and dynamic cloud-native applications. Traditional monitoring solutions continue to play a vital role, and will do so for years to come, but it becomes problematic when cloud functionality is bolted onto existing monitoring and APM solutions. Too often, when new use cases are added to existing solutions, data remains disconnected and siloed, forcing users to jump from tab to tab to try to identify the root causes of performance issues. Furthermore, very few of these solutions provide complete visibility, for example, insight into business metrics or security performance. Many are naturally biased towards a particular layer of the IT stack depending on their legacy, whether the application or core infrastructure.

So what should technologists consider when evaluating a cloudnative observability solution?

Technologists need a solution that allows them to monitor the health of key business transactions that are distributed across their technology landscape. If an issue is detected, they need to follow the thread of the business transaction’s telemetry data, so they can quickly determine the root cause of issues, with fault domain isolation, and triage the issue to the correct teams for expedited resolution.

And they’ll need a solution that combines observability with advanced AIOps functionality. They need to leverage the power of AIOps and business intelligence to prioritise actions for their cloud environments. In the future, organisations will utilise AI-assisted issue detection and diagnosis with insights for faster troubleshooting. Ultimately, it allows technologists to focus more quickly on what really matters and where and why it happened.

As the application world has evolved massively over the past two years, technologists must ensure that their monitoring capabilities keep pace. From understanding how highly-distributed cloud-native applications work and predicting incidents, to adopting new ways to gather vast amounts of MELT telemetry data, teams across IT Ops, DevOps, CloudOps, and SREs need contextual insights that provide business context deep within the tech stack.

Only with the right cloud-native observability solution in place will organisations be able to maximise the benefits of modern applications, driving enhanced digital experiences for customers and improved business outcomes.

What can you tell us about your recently launched cloud-observability platform, AppDynamics Cloud?

AppDynamics Cloud enables the delivery of exceptional digital experiences by correlating telemetry data from across any cloud environment at a massive scale. It leverages cloud-native observability to remediate application performance issues with business context and insights-driven actions. It delivers power and usability in a single, intuitive interface. And puts the focus where it needs to be, on 360-degree visibility and insights and the ability to take action that leads to extraordinary application experiences every time.

Moreover, AppDynamics Cloud maximises business outcomes and customer experiences by continuously optimising cloud-native applications. It accelerates the detection and resolution of performance issues before they impact the business or the brand with intelligent operations. Investment protection is derived from continuous data integrations with OpenTelemetry standards and technology partnerships with cloud solutions and providers.

New teams manage cloud-native applications with different mindsets, skills, and ways of working. Does this platform meet their needs?

The platform enables collaboration across teams, including DevOps, site reliability engineers (SREs), and other key business stakeholders to achieve common benchmarks like service-level objectives (SLOs) and organisational KPIs. While many organisations still run their missioncritical and revenue-generating systems with traditional applications, modern business apps are increasingly built using DevOps initiatives and must support distributed architectures and services. This pandemic-accelerated trend has spawned an end-to-end experience revolution among consumers and end users, and hybrid work is contributing exponential momentum.

To deliver the consistent, reliable digital experiences that consumers and end users now demand, IT teams must monitor and manage a dynamic set of application dependencies across a mix of infrastructure, microservices, containers, and APIs using home-grown IT stacks, multiple clouds, SaaS services, and security solutions. Unfortunately, traditional monitoring approaches break down in this vastly complex and dynamic ecosystem.

AppDynamics Cloud seamlessly ingests the deluge of metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) generated in this environment — including network, databases, storage, containers, security, and cloud services—to make sense of the current state of the entire IT stack all the way to the end user. Actions can then be taken to optimise costs, maximise transaction revenue, and secure user and organisational data.

Built from the ground up with cloudnative observability, AppDynamics Cloud is about real outcomes, so organisation can fix issues when they arise, or even before they happen, and ensure digital services offer exactly what users want.