How IBM Apptio Delivers Data Center Value in the Age of AI

As organizations accelerate their adoption of AI and use of hybrid infrastructure, data center efficiency has become a direct constraint of business modernization and growth. Global demand for data center capacity is expected to triple by 2030, with nearly 70% of that demand being driven by AI workloads.

At the same time, the rising cost of essential data center resources, including power, cooling, and physical space, is making it harder to operate efficiently control costs. Demand for data center power is projected to increase 165% between 2023 and 2030, placing existing facilities under pressure and creating a critical bottleneck for organizations trying to scale to meet growing demand.

These heightened pressures – of both demand and costs – mean leaders need to do more with what they have. This requires full visibility into the investments made to maintain and operate their data center footprint.

The key challenge of data centers

Without a clear view of data center costs and capacity, most organizations cannot answer fundamental questions about their data centers: What does it really cost to operate our data center footprint, how much usable capacity remains, and how can our data centers continue to support our needs?

But data center operations span multiple teams, systems, and parts of the business, including:

• Facilities and real estate teams
• Power and cooling metrics
• Vendor contracts
• Labor and financial systems
• Infrastructure and asset inventories

Each of these domains is managed in isolation with different metrics and owners, making it nearly impossible to connect cost to capacity or consumption in a meaningful way. These siloes prevent an end-to-end understanding of how data center investments deliver real value for the business – and the potential impact is significant. Organizations risk overprovisioning infrastructure, underutilizing existing capacity, and making costly reactive investment decisions – ultimately leading to wasted capacity and avoidable spend that minimizes the efficiency of their investments.

Introducing IBM Apptio’s newest solution: Data Center TCO

To address these challenges, IBM Apptio introduces Data Center TCO, an out-of-the-box solution designed to unify cost, capacity, and consumption insights across an organization’s data center footprint. With purpose-built models and reports, the solution helps organizations accelerate time to value and make informed, proactive investments decisions.

IBM Apptio Data Center TCO delivers a unified, enterprise-wide view of the costs required to operate and maintain their data center facilities.* By combining financial and operational perspectives, the solution helps the following stakeholders align on a shared, consistent understanding:

• Data center and facility owners
• IT Finance teams
• CIOs and executive leadership
• Infrastructure and application owners

With that shared view, they can identify optimization opportunities, improve visibility and accountability, and build a more proactive, scalable data center strategy – enabling organizations to turn fragmented data into confident long-term decisions.

Understand your data center cost footprint

Gain a standardized, comprehensive view of data center facility spend across your organization. Analyze costs by facility type, region, facility manager, and tier to derive unit cost insights, such as $/kW, $/rack, and $/sq ft, and drill into key cost drivers such as power, vendors, and labor.

These insights help you compare facilities and sites, identify inefficiencies, guide investment decisions, and uncover cost optimization opportunities such as contract renegotiation, labor reallocation, and site consolidation.

Answer questions like:

• What is total data center TCO by site and region?
• What are unit costs by site, such as $/kW, $/rack, and $/sq ft?
• How is facility cost distributed across key cost drivers such as facilities, power, labor, and vendor contracts?
• Does our data center footprint support our growing investment in AI deliverables?

Identify and optimize capacity utilization and constraints

With visibility and clear understanding into each facility’s utilization and available headroom across power, space, and cooling, leaders can manage capacity more proactively and reduce the need for short-term, reactive remediation. This may include actions such as redistributing workloads across facilities, expanding capacity, consolidating underutilized sites, or reevaluating co-location and leased facility strategies.

Answer questions like:

• What is our utilization for critical data center resources?
• Where are resources underutilized across facilities?
• How much headroom remains before reaching capacity limits?
• Which constraints are limiting workload growth at each facility?

Improve accountability of data center consumption

Built on Apptio’s ATUM (Apptio TBM Unified Model), the solution helps leaders trace how data center facility costs are allocated to supported infrastructure, such as servers and storage, and then carried forward to applications, services, products, and business units. Infrastructure owners can understand how facility costs flow into supported assets such as servers and storage, while application, service, product, and business unit owners gain visibility into how those costs contribute to their overall spend. This enables defensible showback and chargeback across the organization, improving consumption accountability.

Answer questions like:

• How are data center costs allocated to servers and storage?
• How do infrastructure costs flow from servers and storage to applications, services, and business units?
• What is the cost contribution of data center infrastructure to each solution and business unit?

Get More from your Data Center investments

Data Center TCO helps organizations take a more disciplined, forward-looking approach to data center strategy. As AI increases pressure on capacity, power, and cost, the solution gives leaders the visibility needed to make more confident decisions about facility operations, optimization, and growth.

Ready to take control of your data center costs and capacity? Sign up for a demo to learn more.

See how Data Center TCO works

* For this solution, IBM Apptio’s calculation of TCO is based on the costs of operating and maintaining the physical data center facility only. It does NOT include the cost of storage, servers, and network devices.