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What Is the German Energy Efficiency Act?
In September of 2023, Germany’s Parliament (Bundestag) passed the Energy Efficiency Act (“EnEfG”). This act is of particular interest to network operators in the region as one focus of the EnEfG is on data center power consumption regardless of the industry. Operators of data centers across all sectors must:
- avoid and make use of waste heat
- increase data center power usage effectiveness
- supply data center power from renewable energies
- introduce energy and environmental management systems
- document and submit energy consumption information to the government
This law represents just one of an ever-increasing number of regulations aimed at making energy savings compulsory in the management of network infrastructure and highlights the importance of the energy sector in the operation of network infrastructure across all industries.
How Can We Bring Data Center Power Usage in Compliance?
An effective way to reduce waste heat is to reduce the unnecessary consumption of resources and compute. Successful capacity planning, therefore, becomes imperative to energy efficiency, but mistakenly overprovisioning capacity is now easier than ever with the popularity of cloud and software-defined architectures.
A HashiCorp-Forrester report indicated that 94% of enterprises overspend on cloud with underused resources being the prime culprit. As a matter of fact, a study from Cast AI has found that, on average, businesses use only around 13% of CPU provisioned and 20% of memory.
What Role Does Network Automation Play?
While energy management systems (EMS) can track demand and ensure efficient delivery of power requested from network hardware, network automation plays a crucial role in the effort to reduce waste heat and energy.
Energy management systems lack the visibility to assess whether energy demand is utilized efficiently. Continuous automated assessment of network utilization, capacity, and performance is therefore paramount to successful compliance with energy regulation.
NetBrain enhances the observability of your heterogeneous data center environment, able to gather and document network usage from your multi-vendor network devices. NetBrain then ensures regulatory compliance by capturing energy, capacity, and utilization targets as self-enforcing intent automation.
How Does It Work?
You can see it in action by catching the replay of our live webinar on real-time capacity assessments. If you’d like your own personalized demo, schedule a meeting with one of our experts!