The Art of Information

Attempting to summarize the thesis of John Naisbitt’s seminal 1982 book, Megatrends may be foolhardy, but I’ll try here - a Megatrend is a fundamental shift in a market that forces a strategic shift in how a corporation competes, thrives, and expands. Examples are electrification, mass production and the shift from a hierarchically-oriented organization to a networked or matrixed corporate structure. The rise of the information age is another Megatrend. There is increasing proof that IT sustainability is emerging as another. Sustainability in IT is broader than simply “greening” our Data Centers, which house our ever-increasing piles of hardware and software. I’ve shared with you in past posts like “Storage for the 31st Century” that HDS and Hitachi Ltd have been at the forefront of sustainable IT R&D and production for many years. One shining example of our commitment to sustainable IT is the Yokohama Green Data Center (YGDC) in Yokohama, Japan. From the heating, cooling and power systems to the materials and processes used to manufacture both the building itself and much of the Hitachi and HDS equipment housed within, the YGDC reduces its impact on the environment while still offering our customers world-class levels of service.

While good intentions or a healthier planet are strong motivators for us to move towards IT sustainability sometimes the “stick” is mightier than the “carrot”. In other words for-profit corporations who are beholden to their shareholders are under enormous pressure to return value to those shareholders - sometimes at the expense of morals (remember Enron) or the environment.

Putting corporate profits ahead of environmental consciousness or unsustainable IT or business practices is simply no longer viable. In the days following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig off the Louisiana coast, stockholders punished BP, the lessee of the rig, by evaporating more than $30B US of the company’s market cap. The blowback from this environmental disaster didn’t stop with BP - Transocean Ltd, the rig’s operator, lost a full 20% of its entire market cap (about $6B US of value), and Haliburton and Cameron International Corp, the manufacturer of the “fail safe” device that , well, failed, were also punished.

While environmentalists have been waging peaceful and sometimes violent war on behalf of the environment for over 40 years, the sprawl of technology in the information age, and our increasing reliance on IT in every facet of our lives puts more focus on this topic. IT sustainability is not a single technology, process or product, but an holistic approach that encompasses the entire lifecycle of IT from supply chain to operations to disposal.

Bringing IT sustainability back to storage, 2 weeks ago HDS announced the Unified Compute Platform (UCP) combining HDS software, storage and servers with Microsoft’s Hyper-V, infrastructure software and SQL database into a powerful but open integrated offering. This represents one of our next steps forward in providing our customers with a more holistic approach to IT sustainability that doesn’t compromise performance or reliability to save a few watts of power.

At the heart of the solution will be an intelligent orchestration layer of software that allows administrators centralized and coordinated management for the entire system. While the unified compute platform will offer features common to all HDS storage systems like thin provisioning which wastes less capacity (and therefore requires fewer drives to be spinning and less power/cooling), the orchestration layer will expand this approach within and between clusters, allowing customers to reduce their consumption of server, networking and storage assets on a much larger scale.

But we won’t stop there - using the same architecture that allows HDS to provide pay-per-use storage to our customers today, you can imagine us offering corporate customers or service providers the ability to monitor and track environmental metrics like CO2 consumption or power/cooling load based upon a given SLA. Trending these metrics and reporting them back to internal departments or external customers enables a Data Center operator to monetize IT sustainability. This is just one example.

The recent BP oil spill illustrates that the stakes for environmental consciousness have never been higher and will likely continue to rise. The information age fuels our appetite for and increases our reliance on IT. While it will take years for the IT sustainability Megatrend to reshape how companies thrive, profit or are punished for their environmental practices, it feels like we’re getting close to the tipping point for IT sustainability.

Perhaps if a few more large global corporations put IT sustainability high on their priority lists and instill this into their corporate cultures, we’ll see IT sustainability as the rare “win-win-win” that it promises to be - good for the company, good for the shareholders and good for the planet. As we celebrate our 100th anniversary, HDS and Hitachi, Ltd. , will continue to be one of those large global organizations for whom IT sustainability is a priority not just for a single group or product, but across the many diverse teams that make up the Hitachi Group and also for our customers.

What do you think? I’d love to hear from you, your opinions, ideas, or how your organization view IT Sustainability.

If you’re interested in learning more about HDS and Hitachi’s investment in IT Sustainability:

• Visit Hitachi’s Global R&D portal - http://www.hitachi.com/rd/research.html
• Check out some photos of the YGDC on our Flickr stream
• Bookmark our unified compute platform page and stay tuned for more…

Thanks to Amy Hodler from HDS for her contribution to this post