14 July 2023 – Orange France – The current energy crisis is a really global issue, with record high prices, fuel shortages, and declining economies around the world. Oil prices rose to levels not seen since 2008 in 2022, affecting consumers’ access to and affordability of energy.
The telecoms industry is very concerned about this issue. According to GSMA Intelligence, energy usage will account for between 15% and 40% of telco operators’ operating expenses in 2021. With the predicted increase in data traffic and the new infrastructure required to support 5G, energy consumption and emissions are expected to climb in the coming years. Fortunately, the industry is not treating this situation lightly. Orange is one such example.
Orange Group, which operates in 26 countries, focuses on sustainable growth by reinventing itself and adapting to a continuously changing world while achieving excellent performance on social and environmental challenges. The Group is aiming for a 30% reduction in direct emissions by 2025, with the ultimate goal of becoming a Net Zero Carbon firm by 2040. This would make it a telecoms industry pioneer, reaching this goal a full decade ahead of the rest of the industry.
Orange France is assisting the Orange Group in driving change. The subsidiary, which has 26 million subscribers and will produce roughly EUR €18 billion in 2021, is committed to supporting Orange Group’s environmental goals through significant operational change.
Orange France
Orange France selected data centers as a critical component of its sustainability strategy and went on a path to close 17 aging, inefficient facilities and invest in three cutting-edge data centers. These new facilities may function without air conditioning for 10 months of the year due to their environmentally sensitive design, decreasing their energy consumption by up to 30 percent when compared to legacy buildings. The data centers are among the most efficient in France, with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.3, and are considered important assets for the Group.
Orange France began collaborating closely with VMware Professional Services. According to Mathias Rousselet, head of Orange France’s virtualization innovation cloud, “the advantage of Professional Services is that they spend time with us and learn about our ecosystem and environment.” VMware products have many possibilities, but they show us how to make them work best for Orange.”
Orange France built a private cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation that spans its old and new data centers. This permitted the movement of apps and data to the new facilities. To date, one-third of all workloads have been relocated. The efficiency of private cloud has reduced the need for servers tenfold, resulting in huge energy savings. According to Orange, the average workload in its private cloud consumes much less energy.
“VMware Cloud Foundation and Aria Automation help us optimize resources to reduce our carbon emissions,” explains David Varusio, IT Cloud Project Manager at Orange France. “We’ve reduced our hardware footprint across computing, storage, and networking, there is better sizing of IT environments from the start, and we’re running the same number of applications on ten times fewer servers.”
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