Sustainability meets AI: Navigating challenges and opportunities

A recent State of IT-driven Sustainability survey, conducted by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) and commissioned by NetApp, revealed intriguing insights into the drivers of corporate sustainability initiatives. Although government compliance narrowly surpassed profitability as the primary motivator, the study identified several other significant factors, including cost reduction, enhanced goodwill, and improved brand image. All of these factors play crucial roles in elevating the importance of sustainability efforts in organizations.

By integrating sustainability practices into their organizations, business leaders can achieve significant cost savings by improving energy efficiency, reducing waste, and optimizing resource utilization. They also enhance their brand reputation by attracting environmentally conscious customers and top talent who care about corporate responsibility.

Some organizations have made significant strides in sustainability, with many of their core components and applications now being closely tracked, managed, and optimized to maximize energy efficiency and minimize carbon emissions. Despite these advances, there's still potential for further enhancement. An analysis of future sustainability investments reveals that artificial intelligence is at the forefront, accounting for 32% of planned expenditures, with cloud services and storage infrastructure following closely behind.

This trend underscores the fact that sustainability has become a key strategic focus for most organizations, driving their decision-making and purchasing selections.

In the sustainability survey, 42% of respondents believe that the energy efficiency of products or services is the most important capability related to their IT-driven sustainability initiatives. According to estimates, data storage accounts for 25% of data center power usage, and this figure is expected to increase in the coming years.

Data management in the age of sustainability

With the exponential growth of data, traditional storage solutions are becoming increasingly unsustainable due to their high energy consumption and carbon footprint. To reduce carbon emissions, companies are increasingly focusing on high-density NVMe capacity flash technology, such as QLC flash storage, which can reduce rack space and save on energy costs. In addition, cloud providers are investing in renewable energy sources to power their data centers, giving customers the chance to use more efficient compute instances and storage solutions. As technology advances, companies can take advantage of a portfolio of sustainable solutions to support their core business strategy.

Harnessing AI for sustainability and making AI sustainable

Although many companies acknowledge the long-term benefits of sustainable practices, the growing demand for generative AI to revolutionize business operations and provide new customer experiences has raised significant sustainability concerns.

The sustainability survey reveals that customers have a mixed outlook about the role of AI in sustainability. The majority of respondents, 67%, believe that AI will have both positive and negative effects on sustainability efforts.

Developing large-scale AI models, such as transformer-based neural networks, requires processing vast amounts of data through multiple computational layers, resulting in a significant increase in energy usage in the data center.

In contrast, using AI to identify AI-driven sustainability problems is essential for mitigation strategies, according to the survey. With the help of AI, organizations can discover areas where they can make sustainability improvements or optimize operations.

Data centers are the backbone of the digital world, but they consume significant energy. According to the International Energy Agency, data centers consumed 460 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, and their worst-case scenario suggests that consumption could increase to over 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026.

Energy-efficient data centers

Transitioning to high-density QLC flash storage can lead to significant energy savings. Flash storage, using nonvolatile memory chips, consumes significantly less power compared to spinning disks, which require energy-intensive mechanical operations to read and write data. Moreover, the compact nature of flash storage allows higher storage density, which reduces the physical footprint and further contributes to energy savings.

As a provider of critical storage infrastructure to companies around the world, NetApp addresses this need by offering cost-effective, high-capacity all-flash storage solutions, which enable companies to migrate more workloads to flash technology while staying within their budget.

On top of that, NetApp’s leading storage efficiency capabilities are designed to maximize storage performance while reducing overall consumption. By leveraging features such as data deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, redirect-on-write Snapshot™ copies, space-efficient clones, and thin replication, companies can significantly reduce their data footprint, decreasing energy usage and data center cooling costs.

NetApp's intelligent data infrastructure supports both ecological sustainability and economic efficiency. This approach means that businesses can grow responsibly while conserving valuable resources.

Cloud solutions for sustainability

The shift to cloud computing offers significant sustainability benefits. NetApp’s cloud solutions help customers transition to energy-efficient, scalable, and flexible cloud environments.

NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure offers a new way to “unified storage”—any data, any workload, any environment. By combining access to file, block, and object-based storage across corporate data centers, colocation facilities, and public clouds, customers can move their workload to meet their business needs and sustainability goals, such as conducting AI compute-intensive training on a public cloud provider's infrastructure that uses renewable energy.

Customers can choose specific regions that use more sustainable resources by moving their data to NetApp cloud storage solutions in AWS, Azure, or Google. For example, AWS's US-East (Northern Virginia, Ohio), and GovCloud (US-East, US-West) consume all their electricity using renewable energy.

Furthermore, customers can leverage hybrid cloud tiering to automatically transfer data between high-performance storage in their data center and a public cloud provider based on access and usage patterns. This approach keeps their infrequently accessed (cold) data readily available in a more energy-efficient cloud data center.

By reducing their reliance on traditional data centers, businesses can achieve substantial energy savings and minimize their environmental impact.

Sustainability monitoring

NetApp’s approach is to give customers more in-depth knowledge about their carbon footprint by providing tools that track energy consumption, carbon emissions, and underused infrastructure resources. With this knowledge, customers can make informed decisions and implement strategies to decarbonize their data center, protecting the long-term health of their business.

The NetApp BlueXP^™ sustainability dashboard lets customers quickly and easily view their actual and projected power, thermal, and carbon metrics. Additionally, the sustainability score is a unique metric that measures how many NetApp ONTAP^® features, services, and best practices aimed at improving sustainability are enabled. These metrics make it easy for IT leaders to track progress toward their sustainability goals.

Sustainability is a journey that demands constant effort and innovation. As indicated in the State of IT-driven Sustainability survey, customers are seeking a sustainable approach in the data center that involves adopting environmentally friendly practices to help ensure the well-being of our planet for future generations. At NetApp, we aspire to lead by example, integrating sustainable practices into every aspect of our business and empowering our customers to do the same.

Join us in our quest to create a sustainable tomorrow. Together, we have the power to make a difference.

Delve further into NetApp sustainability strategies.

Be sure to check out the NetApp ESG Report.