Tracking Carbon Emissions – Chris Noble, Cirrus Nexus

This is texturing TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throw.

We're here at Chris Noble is the CEO for Sears Nexus and they have some tools that help you figure out what's going on with carbon emissions and it and we're going to be talking about all things sustainability Chris. Welcome to shop. Thanks, Michael.

Really appreciate having us. There's a perception at least that if I turn some Hardware off in the on-premises environment, I move to the cloud. My carbon situation consumption will be better or maybe not as egregious and I guess the question is is a is that true and be how much are people thinking about carbon emissions these days is really exciting.

You know for a really good question, there are a lot of things that to consider when you're moving to the cloud. So so it's not that you're giving up hardware for clatter. You're just moving it to another piece of Hardware.

The idea is that with Cloud, you know in Cloud, it's more scalable. It's more there's a efficiencies of scale that go on. There are you know, it's a lot of shared hardware.

So the idea is that you get better sustainability the challenges if you're not monitoring it if you're not actively managing it it can get out of hand like anything else. So and as far as people considering we find that without with a lot of our clients, they're very much considering, you know, the cost of car and the social impact how much of impacts their business but they don't always know how to monitor it and how to meet or it and what it means and you know, a lot of focus on scope one scope too emissions. Let's go three emissions, especially when you talk about the value chain or also very important.

So, how do I keep track of what kinds of carbon emissions I'm doing in the cloud because well, it's on somebody else's infrastructure. So, how do I know what's going on? So good questions.

So a lot of companies out there are putting you know have sort of and I you know an idea of what's going on with or an idea of reporting. So what ends up happening is you'll get some idea that you're running a certain amount of Hardware which produces it what our tool does a lot what we look what we try to do is actual look at your hour by hour missions how much you're causing you produce. So that's real real trick is you know, if I'm running my workloads at various various utilization, whether it's saying they're idle full load that those emissions change so being able to to Monitor and be able to assign amount of carbon that's causing me produced by that workload.

That's really critical. And do you think also that you know, one of the benefits of the cloud is it's easier to run workloads up in the cloud. But ultimately I may wind up kicking off more carbon because I am running more applications in the cloud.

So does that kind of create something ever catch 22? It very good observations. So what we've noticed is that since it's not it's it's scalable.

Right? So you have as much computing power on demand as you want. So you're right so companies particularly.

I key directors get in get in the cloud and they find all these resources they can use them. What happens sometimes is one they they tend to get the they tend to overscale a little bit people tend to not optimize as best as possible. So what ends up happening is that that it just sort of grows out of control.

So yeah and that sense right since it's relatively speaking infinitely scalable for for an IP user for company. They tend to consume more resources. So you're right.

It does it does increase the amount of CO2 that's being that's causing me produced by by that load. So again, you know kind of going back to that if you're monitoring optimizing and keeping those cost controls and play you can help reduce that hopefully that answers your question Michael. Aren't people monitoring this these days because they're required to by law or is it more as the companies themselves have greater sense of social responsibility and the movement is coming from maybe outside the it organization, but the focus is that it because that's an easy target.

yeah, it's at the moment there. So there's no real government regulations companies are reporting oftentimes in different parts of the world. Like we deal a lot of work with the companies the EU and the UK as well as the us we find that a lot of a lot of companies are self-reporting.

We know that's coming. We know that government government regulations are going to start requiring more more reporting more frequently and more accurate and more accurate. But what we're really finding in the companies that are really conscientious of their of their of ESG of their carbon footprint are going out currently and they understand that by producing by having carbon produce during your it operations that there's a social there's a social cost to that carbon there's an impact and they look at it as as impact to their business.

Can include everything from the ability to attract talent to their investors to partner companies. So more and more the really cost country or the really carbon cognition companies are assigning a value to carbon and they're in they're using that in their budget when they when they purchase and rent cloud computing. Do you think anybody might ever actually move or workload from the cloud back to an on-premise environment because of these carbon issues or is that just off the table?

Yeah, it's you're not gonna say you're not gonna really reduce carbon by doing that for other reasons we see some companies moving certain parts of their it operations back to an on-prem or a different managed service but that's mostly around redundancy or latency issues a couple of other things that that come into play but as far as moving back to to a decentralized compute, we don't see that happening be the vast majority of companies are either moving to a cloud first policy or in a cloud first policy or very seriously into it we have a couple clients that about they're very they're moving that policies are much forward with Cloud first, we don't see that changing What's involved in actually setting this up? I mean by deploying agent software somewhere or is there some way to kind of figure this out with a lessontrusive approach or how does it work? Good question.

So we originally start off as a cost optimization. And one thing we want to avoid was that it was agents, right? So we were our particular product agent list.

What we do is we look at utilization rates we look at and this is information that you get from from Azure from AWS, you know from your work from those specific workloads. We consume that and then we apply it to both a cost and a car that we take data that we get from various sources to the carbon intensity of the electricity being provided those data centers or regions Cloud regions, and then we apply that carbon value. So it's agent list.

It's actually pretty easy to set up. All right. So at some point it sounds like you know, somebody's gonna come around and start asking these questions, but maybe you know, are you see an IT people being more proactive about this because you know, they kind of want to Market themselves within their organizations is good citizens.

It's good for their brand good for their own personal image. Absolutely. We we get a lot of we have a lot of conversations with various levels of it that are very interested in making sure that they are not gonna caught in that, you know, take a large company.

They they don't want to be seen as a dirty company. We have one of our clients as an energy major and they're stated goal is to get out a car right they want to be in the energy production and distribution business in the future. So they take it very consciously.

We have a couple other clients that understand that there is a direct impact on their reputation as to how much carbon they're causing produce. So they're very actively doing it. You know, we also have a lot of other clients that are just in the beginning stages and they're trying to figure out what that impact is to them.

So the answer your question directly. Yes. Absolutely.

We see a lot of people more moving more and more the some of the pitfalls that we see as well is a lot of people get into a kind of a, you know, excuse the expression a green washing trap right where they're reporting off of some snapshot and time and not really Looking at, you know current utilization for instance the your carbon intensity not only changes by how intense your workloads are but they also change by the weather, you know, we're going through you know and parts of the US around the world right? We're going through through Heat Wave right now. So the amount of carbon can reduce is significantly more because the demand for electricity for cooling for all the other for all the other things right now are really demand.

So the only way to really hit that Peak is to spin up carbon producing power plants, you know oil gas Some Coal, you know liquid fine natural gas. That's how they meet those people. So when it gets hotter the car that carbon intensity goes up so looking at how much your workload is in a snapshot on time isn't isn't really ideal.

You really want to look at it hourly by hourly in a varies. So we help companies do is figure out where to run your workload. That's least carbon intensive any particular time and day time of week time of month based on all those different variables.

Do you think people may move workloads from one availability Zone in the cloud to another based on how much carbon is being driven? And is that part of the cost analysis equation these days absolutely. In fact, that's what that's what one of the things that we think really sets.

Our product part is that we we actually can automate that movement but you know based on depending on the type of workload and and the infrastructure behind it, but we help them make that decision and we can also actually do it. So for instance, you know in people think we get the perceptions teams to be that the peak we're the peak amount of energy is in the middle of the day. It's actually not sure the peak amount of energy is in the mornings and evenings when people are you know making breakfast cooking dinner?

When that that electricity demand is really high. So a company that looks at running their early if it's an East Coast company running your work clothes on the west coast in the morning and moving it back. Day into the east coast and then, you know based on cost and based on availability and then based on that carbon and again applying that cost of the carbon really makes that business decision and driving those behaviors is to where you run the workloads.

We also see that people are training carving credits. So regardless of what I think of this particular debate about climate change. It may be irrelevant because ultimately there's an economic model now so, you know, we're gonna see a lot more of this where people are going to come around it departments and say hey we need you to kind of help us, you know, reduce our load here so we can not buy as many carbon credits.

yeah, you know comments actually think it's it's At the end of the day, there's x amount of carbon that's being produced on the energy grid, right? It doesn't matter who's you know, who buys what credit there's a certain amount of tons of carbon on any particular age you get every day. They get that gets and who takes credit for that?

Okay, somebody's at the end of the day has to take credit for that the idea that you know, what we the behavior we want to drive is is what you're really alluding to is it doesn't you know, it doesn't matter how many carbon credits you buy or how much carbon offset you do if we're still producing carbon. We're still putting carbon in the air. We want to reduce that at least optimize as much as possible, you know, it accounts for, you know, three to four percent of global carbon emissions at the moment.

We know Studies have shown that by 2040 it will require more energy and as being produced today. So how we provide that power and how we do it, you know ecologically sound with a minimal amount of carbon and how we distribute that energy is really gonna be key to the future of it and being sust All right, folks here in here first, you're gonna have to add some carbons to the metrics that you were tracking alongside. Everything else.

I know would be hard but we'll make it possible one way or another Chris. Thanks for being on the show Michael. Thank you very much very much.

Enjoyed it be on the show you all right back to you guys in the studio.