Sustainability as a first-class metric for developers and end-users

Sustainability is increasingly important as datacenters continue to consume vast quantities of resources worldwide. VMware is already well-positioned to reduce power consumption by increasing server consolidation, as a recent IDC report attests. However, improved server consolidation is only one piece of the sustainability puzzle, and individual engineers may be hard-pressed to understand how they can individually contribute to improving sustainability. The conventional methods for demonstrating sustainability do not provide a true measure of the amount of impact an individual engineer can make. In this paper, we explore the sustainability life cycle of our products, not just from the perspective of an end consumer, but also from an internal developer perspective. We take three simple use cases and explore how optimizations can implicitly lead to improved sustainability. From these use cases, we discuss various ways in which sustainability can be quantified. We argue that VMware should start recording and publishing sustainability metrics and use these metrics to help drive customer adoption and help drive internal productivity improvements.