Two roles, two areas of expertise, one shared ambition : modernising the digital infrastructure while reducing its carbon footprint.
At the Brittany Regional Council (CRB), Noëlle Guérin, infrastructure systems engineer, and Hervé Le Luherne, deputy director of digital services and head of responsible digital strategy, explain how DC Scope® has become a key tool in their transformation.
Can you introduce yourselves and explain your respective roles within the Brittany Regional Council ?
- Noëlle Guérin : I am a team leader and systems infrastructure engineer at the Brittany Regional Council. Together with my team, we are responsible for the physical environments used by both the institutional services and the region’s secondary schools. This includes hosting all business and technical virtual machines across production, pre-production, acceptance, test and management environments, as well as managing backup systems, the disaster recovery plan (DRP), and the ongoing optimisation of these technical platforms.
- Hervé Le Luherne : I am deputy director of digital and information systems for the Region. I oversee a wide range of responsibilities, including the governance of our responsible digital strategy.
Before DC Scope®, what were the main challenges in your respective areas ?
- Noëlle Guérin : One of my main challenges was modernising an infrastructure that had become obsolete. To support this initiative, I needed to build a case clearly demonstrating the limits of the existing environment: overconsumption of resources (CPU/RAM), poor energy efficiency, ageing hardware, recurring slowness… Data collection was carried out using several tools and custom scripts, which enabled me to obtain meaningful figures. However, analysing this data proved extremely time-consuming and complex due to the lack of a centralised and intuitive tool.
- Hervé Le Luherne : Our challenge was to be able to capture energy consumption data from our data infrastructure. In this case, I cannot speak much about the “before”, as we have been customers for many years. However, we rediscovered the product through the lens of responsible digital practices, and we truly began to leverage its full capabilities. DC Scope® aligned perfectly with what I needed on this topic.
What specific needs has DC Scope® addressed in your systems infrastructure management ?
Noëlle Guérin :
- Time saved on recurring tasks: The tool makes it easier to manage snapshots and generate custom reports, particularly for the VMs I monitor regularly due to application performance issues.
- Instant visibility of performance: The charts offer a clear and immediate view of resource consumption (RAM, CPU, disk, network) for each VM, which greatly improves diagnostics.
- Decision-making support: DC Scope® helps me anticipate resource needs, plan the addition of new VMs or hardware purchases, and guide long-term strategic decisions.
Can you share a concrete example of measurable improvement ?
In practical terms, we removed 130 VMs, some of which had been unused for several years, representing a 15% reduction in unnecessarily consumed resources. This optimisation also allowed us to decommission 2 ESXi hosts from the 28 originally in place.
How has DC Scope® transformed your daily work ? Which features bring the most value to your operations ?
- Noëlle Guérin : DC Scope® has helped me simplify several operational tasks. To keep my infrastructure clean, I use the Storage View to tidy up (obsolete snapshots), check the number of IOPs per datastore, the Graph on Demand to verify consumption on specific VMs, and the reporting features to extract the necessary data.
What information does DC Scope® provide to help you track and reduce the carbon footprint of your digital infrastructures ?
- Hervé Le Luherne : The product first provides annualised global data for our data infrastructures, which allows us to consolidate our annual greenhouse gas (GHG) assessment.
But the most valuable aspect is the per-server and per-VM GHG metrics. This level of granularity is extremely useful for precise operational monitoring.
Can you name a decision or strategic project directly influenced by data from the tool ?
- Hervé Le Luherne : As Noëlle mentioned, our first major initiative guided by the DC Scope® metrics was to intensify the decommissioning of unused VMs. We were not the worst in this area, but we still had room for improvement. In parallel, the VM level metrics allow us to verify the impact of architectural choices. This was particularly useful when we began experimenting with eco-design use cases on existing services.
Does DC Scope® provide an ROI in under a year thanks to the savings achieved ?
- Hervé Le Luherne : Even though we’re not actively tracking this data today, as our information systems are still undergoing continuous restructuring, I am almost certain that the cost of DC Scope® is more than offset by the optimisation it has enabled.
How does DC Scope® support your broader objectives in responsible digital transformation and CSR compliance?
- Hervé Le Luherne : We cannot pursue responsible digital practices without objectively measuring the impact of our actions. We also cannot prioritise the actions in our responsible digital roadmap without understanding which areas have the highest GHG impact. From that perspective, we needed a solution to monitor the GHG emissions of our data infrastructures and DC Scope® meets our needs perfectly.
What have you learned from using DC Scope® jointly in your two fields, and how does this synergy create value for the Regional Council ?
- Noëlle Guérin : Analysing the carbon footprint and the consumption of our equipment has enabled us to make the right technical and environmental choices.
- Hervé Le Luherne : We’ve learned that architectural decisions cannot be made solely from a responsible digital perspective and they can no longer be made solely from a technical perspective either.
We need to work closely together to make the right decisions.
If you were to recommend DC Scope® to other organisations, what key benefit would you emphasise ?
- Noëlle GUERIN : I would highlight the practicality of the reporting features. The analysis reports make it possible to export tailored recommendations for our infrastructure, and the capacity planning features help us make the right hardware investment decisions.
- Hervé Le Luherne : The ability to achieve environmental oversight of your data infrastructure from the macro level down to the micro level.
Key takeaways
- Immediate rationalisation : 130 VMs and 2 servers removed, freeing up 15% of resources.
- Precise carbon monitoring : usable metrics down to the VM level to support GHG reporting.
- Operational efficiency : simplified reporting, capacity planning and day-to-day operations.
- Aligned governance : technical and CSR decisions taken jointly, with ROI already visible.
The Brittany Regional Council illustrates a wider trend: digital performance is no longer measured solely by power, but also by environmental impact. With DC Scope®, infrastructure management becomes a driver for the transition.
