How to Understand Your Company’s CO₂ Consumption — And Do Something About It

Making a positive environmental impact with StorageMAP.

In the past two years alone, 88% of publicly-traded companies and 67% of privately-owned companies had environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives put into place. These frameworks are designed to help company stakeholders understand how their company is managing risks and opportunities around sustainability.

A key component of ESG planning is addressing an organization’s carbon footprint. What started initially as a buzzword in the technology world, carbon footprint has now become a top concern of IT leaders.

Infrastructure and unstructured data management are both prime examples of how ESG and reducing carbon footprint are having an influence on tech strategy. Cloud platform operators routinely publish statistics around their ecological goals and pursue ambitious sustainability programs, and infrastructure providers are now under intense pressure to play a full and active role in saving the planet.

While the cloud has an inherent advantage over on-premises for carbon reduction, moving all data en-mass will not help IT leaders meet ESG objectives. In order for IT leaders to maximize the most value out of its unstructured data, and lower carbon footprint as a result, it is important for them to have an understanding of data centers where unstructured data is stored, who owns it, and its purpose.

Let’s dig into the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of data centers, and how organizations can have data in the right place, at the right time all of the time to lower carbon footprint with StorageMAP.

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and the Digital “Landfill”

It’s no secret that the infrastructure and computing power within data centers consume a lot energy (around 3% of the global electricity actually) and inefficient data centers will use much more.

An inefficient data center can easily turn into a digital “landfill.” In these environments, the data just simply takes up space, money, and power while giving very little in return. Just like trying to find anything specific in a regular landfill, digging through a digital landfill is time consuming and hazardous for IT leaders.

PUE can be a way to determine the energy efficiency of a data center.

The amount of power consumed by the entire facility — including all data center gear, power supply components, cooling systems, and lighting systems, alongside the energy required to power up your data center all play an important role in your PUE.

Knowing total energy consumption allows determination of the CO₂ emissions associated with the power being consumed by all data center resources – including storage systems. With the knowledge of the CO₂ emissions associated with the storage systems in use, StorageMAP can help IT leaders gain a deeper understanding of the level of CO₂ emissions that can be attributed to each individual dataset. While there are times data might be relocated due to cost advantages there are also times that data might be relocated due to the impact of lowering greenhouse gas emissions by storing data in a location whose power contributes to far lower CO₂ emissions such as at a cloud provider whose power sources have a higher degree of renewable energy.

StorageMAP Aids in Reducing Carbon Footprint

StorageMAP is a multi-vendor, multi-cloud data management platform that enables enterprises to tackle the biggest unstructured data management problems of today, including reducing carbon footprint.

The platform enables IT leaders to do carbon accounting for unstructured data stored across their entire network. StorageMAP enables IT leaders to make informed decisions on whether unstructured data should be transferred to a cloud hosting service and what steps, including eliminating redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data, need to be made. With StorageMAP, you are provided with visibility into the cost and CO2 emissions associated with all datasets providing IT leaders with the information they need to ensure the right data is on the right platform based on cost and sustainability goals. In addition, the platform can also enable IT leaders to transfer data across any free space in existing storage to speed up decommissioning of outdated, high-carbon footprint storage.

If you are struggling to lower your carbon footprint and want to learn more about StorageMAP, contact us today.