Hitachi Vantara, the data storage, infrastructure, and hybrid cloud management subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd, has officially confirmed the news that its new Virtual Storage Platform One Block appliance is now ENERGY STAR® certified. Not just that, the stated appliance has also been recognized as the best storage solution for performance and energy efficiency in the ENERGY STAR NVSS Disk Online 4 category. As a result, Hitachi Vantara now holds top three ranked storage solutions in this category. More the ENERGY STAR certification would reveal how it is provided after a rigorous process where storage solutions are typically evaluated based on their IOPS (input/output operations per second) per Watt, a key metric for measuring the efficiency of input/output operations relative to energy consumption. To give you some context, Hitachi’s Virtual Storage Platform One Block 28 model ranked highest with 538 IOPS per watt, followed by the Virtual Storage Platform One Block 26 at 409 IOPS per watt, and the Virtual Storage Platform E1090 at 368 IOPS per watt. The development in question markedly follows-up on one recently-concluded survey, a survey where it was discovered that 68% of IT decision makers indicated they were concerned with the impact AI/ML had on their organization’s energy use and carbon footprint, whereas around 77% of respondents said that legacy data architectures negatively impacted their sustainability performance.
“At Hitachi Vantara, we understand the growing importance of energy efficiency in today’s data-driven world, and we are committed to helping our customers meet their performance needs while also reducing their environmental impact,” said Octavian Tanase, chief product officer of Hitachi Vantara. “Our Virtual Storage Platform One Block storage appliance exemplifies our vision for the future, delivering powerful, reliable, and eco-friendly solutions that drive value for our customers and help significantly reduce carbon emissions.”
Talk about Virtual Storage Platform One on a slightly deeper level, we must begin from the fact that it is designed to significantly improve performance, and therefore, make it possible for companies to consolidate more workloads onto fewer systems. Such a consolidation, on its part, does a lot to enhance operational efficiency, while simultaneously empowering businesses to realize their green data center goals through an active reduction in their environmental footprint. Beyond that, Hitachi’s Virtual Storage Platform One Block comes decked up with Dynamic Carbon Reduction technology so to reduce energy consumption by switching CPUs into eco-mode during periods of low activity. Then, there is an “Always on compression” mode, which basically allows the system to switch from inline data reduction to post processing, thus further reducing energy consumption and contributing to a lower CO2 footprint by as much as 30 to 40%.
Making the whole proposition even more attractive is, of course, all what Hitachi Vantara has achieved on a more holistic note. For instance, each of the company’s storage arrays has obtained CFP (Carbon Footprint of Products) certification under the SuMPO (Sustainable Management Promotion Organization) environmental labeling program. On top of it, they ensure transparency and environmental accountability by undergoing third-party verification of greenhouse gas emissions per terabyte per year. The company had also, quite recently, received a Gold Medal rating for Sustainability from EcoVadis, a globally recognized leader in assessing corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability practices. Joining the same would be a decade-long experience, on the company’s part, to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continually throughout the entire system lifecycle, from procurement of materials to production, logistics, use, disposal, and recycling.
