Not every company’s sustainability program has teeth. Some struggle because they don’t have full-time, dedicated staff or they aren’t supported by executive leadership. These programs rarely get the results needed to improve our world. Alternatively, the most successful programs create benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) to mark progress around specific sustainability goals.
Sustainability KPIs are well within the realm of possibility—especially for IT. There are multiple areas where IT can provide hard metrics around waste reduction rate, water footprint, carbon footprint and energy consumption in the data center and across the organization.
Add Muscle and Brains to the Sustainability Team
Hitachi Vantara has been steadily improving its own sustainability program and developing resources to support customer efforts. In the data center, for example, customers can leverage a custom analytic portal that provides details on past, current and future energy consumption–covering electricity, CO2 emission, carbon footprint and potential cost savings.
Looking solely at one data center assessment, the potential yearly environmental and economic impacts of an eco-friendly infrastructure are hard to deny. The assessment revealed that a customer’s current annual spending of about $2.5 million could be reduced to $1.1 million.
Hitachi Vantara is also developing and enhancing current products that support sustainability efforts. The Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS), for example, can help reduce the CO2 emissions with its enhanced data reduction technology, which lets customers store more user data on the purchased capacity.
Another area where Hitachi Vantara is helping reduce CO2 emissions is the non-disruptive replacement of the storage controller to next generation systems without data migration. Organizations can avoid time-consuming data migration projects that require systems to run in parallel throughout the migration phase—consuming more power and requiring additional cooling.
Innovations with More Power; Less Energy
With the right insight and guidance, CO2 emissions, water and energy usage and carbon footprints can be driven down. One significant change can come from moving to newer solutions. From one generation of storage solutions to the next, Hitachi Vantara decreased carbon emissions between 30% to 40% compared to previous models. This stat includes the procurement of raw materials, production, transportation, five years of use and final recycle. Taken together, or individually, these advances can help organizations achieve more and reduce environmental impact so they can hit those hard-to-achieve sustainability goals.
Hitachi is putting action and investment in its sustainability program. Visit the Sustainability website to learn more about our corporate and product development plans.
Image Credit: Hitachi Vantara