Using Flexera to show environmental impact of compute resources

[peteoheat]

Not quite sure if this belongs in the FlexNet Manager forum or not.

I'm looking to be able to map and report on the environmental impact of our computing resources. I was wondering whether the Flexera agent does/could gather data on the power consumption of compute resources as a byproduct of discovery?

I realise that this is not the full picture for environmental impact but I need to start somewhere.

[mfranz · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I like the idea. FNMS and the majority of inventory tools won't be able to track these numbers. While there are tools that can give an idea (CPU-Z/GPU-Z), real power consumption can only be measured at the wall socket.

How I would proceed:

1. Use FNMS inventory data to get an idea on your infrastructure and typical models representing your hardware. Maybe stick to a top 10 or some, really depends on how  homogenous  your environment is.
2. Collect real consumption data for a few sample machines using power meters. Or look up manucaturer data for typical scenarios (e.g. display manufacturer usually provide such numbers)
3. Don't forget printers, network, applicances, cooling, etc.
4. Scale the number according to the amount  of machines.

As you mentioned, this is only the begining, there's so much more to consider.

Once you have some data per machine, like power usage, or maybe a CO2 footprint, this yould be added as custom fields to FNMS (e.g. assets), making it easy to report. Part of this could also be automated.

I would really be interested in any progress you make regarding this.

Best regards,

Markward

[peteoheat]

That's a great approach. We're at the very early stages of our FNMS rollout but I hope to have everything up and running by the end of Q1 2021. I'll let you know how we progress.

[Resnofendri]

Hello!

Just adding this information here, might be of interest to pursue. Technopedia has a content pack called 'Hardware Specifications Content Pack' which contains enrichment data on power consumption, environmental factors (temperature, humidity, heat dissipation) as well as electricity factors (voltage, amperage, etc.) associated with the normalized hardware models. The data comes from research conducted by our content team (not a discovery result).

The question now is on how to make this data available in FNMS (it is currently only available in Data Platform). We may want to bring hardware data from FNMS into Data Platform to be normalized, and then export it back into FNMS (along with the hardware specifications) using custom fields as mentioned by @mfranz  above.