[music] Hello everybody and welcome to another CS series session. I'm here with Chris Luth. Chris, thanks for joining me. >> Hey, you bet Jamie. Thanks for having me and I'm really glad to be here with you. >> So today I wanted to spend some time talking about the C series systems. Uh specifically we're going to talk about some sustainability. Energy prices are rising and coupling that with the various corporate sustainability initiatives. It's putting a lot of pressure on IT departments. Um you know talk about a little bit about that Chris. >> Yeah. So the fact of the matter is Jamie data centers consume a tremendous amount of power and most people think of data center power consumption as being equipment uh that they're running in a data center. That's only part of the story. There's also the fact you have to cool that equipment as well. So when you factor those two in um thecost of doing so is made it up to executive levels that this is an area where we can improve our overall energy consumption and sustainability story. Got it. So we're kind of talking about green from two perspectives, right? If you think about your sustainability initiatives and uh and the environment being that one first area of grain and then second uh maybe if you improve your sustainability efforts and hit those goals, you might be saving some dollars andseems like that's thepoint of emphasis there. Also, you know, it seems like we have technology and sustainability kind of almost competing with one another. It's a bit of a double-edged sword, right? you have technologies that aretrying to advance uh some of these sustainability initiatives. And then on the other side, the amount of data being created by these technologies is continuing to grow and it'sputting pressure and increasing the amount of power consumed and carbon emissions. Right. >> You bet. And it's kind of like acatch 22 for us, Jamie. Um, you know, there's a lot of things thatend up on storage systems and data centers, but a big driver is information and communication technology, also known as ICT. Um, and that's your texting, your emails, it's any sort of communication technology, internet of things, another contributor. But anyway, the projections are for the storage alone to consume up to 8% of the world's power by 2030. And I give you the amount of capacity they're anticipating by 2030, but you won't believe me. It's a big number. U and this is up from only 2% in 2020. That's how fast data um capacity is growing on customers and in their data centers. Now, in terms of storage, typically what we see is customers tend to average between 10 and 15% of all their data center energy consumption coming from just powering up the storage.the numbers arepretty staggering. I'll take a moment here to uh to givethe general public a little announcement. You maybethink about the next time you're going to send that email or text uh just the amount of data it's going to create andhow we're going to try and save the world by texting less >> um or reply. [laughter]>> Exactly.I know that's a big point of emphasis at companies. >> Um you know, and at NetApp, we're doing our part, right? We'rea data driven company and so we'redoing our best to uh base what we're doing ondata and facts. >> Yeah. So absolutely Jamie and on our part this isn't just lipstick uh service that you know Netf's promoting we're getting this from George Curan and down that sustainability is our corporate imperative mission that we have to excel on and as I look at the journey of our sustainability umyou know sort of like focus and trying to improve our story over the past six years now's been able to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 70%. And this is on record in our 2022 ESG report that's on our website. Now you don't just reduce your energy consumption by 70%. You have to have some objectives and one of them is coming again from George Curion. We want to be both deliberate very purposeful in driving a sustainability agenda as an organization.That's one part. Another part is we want to help our customers achieve greener storage solutions. um you know so we want to partner with customers and then finally we want to be able to report um theentire carbon footprint of the life cycle of a given storage system that's what I call great cradle to grave or the industry also calls um life cycle carbon analysis LCA but we have that ability to give customers not just their usage phase ofgreenhouse gas emissions but also from building the product to shipping the to customers using the product and finally end of life recycling. >> Yeah. And those are lofty large goals and ittakes a while toget those things right and in place and we're doing our best to ensure that we have those numbers and also that we'reputting those in front of ourcustomers and the end users so they can make those decisions. Right. I believe as part of one of those objectives we joined theMIT PIA consortium. So Chris, I'll let you fill in the uh the team um onwhat that is andhow it works. >> Yeah. So just for people's understanding, MIT is Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Um and then PIA is an acronym for a consortium um product attribute to impact analysis. PIA rolls off the tongue a lot better. So we'll stick with that. But the reason we joined PAIA was to deliver on that LCA life cycle analysis of carbon footprint. And PA has this widely accredited way of taking in a comprehensive start to finish analysis of CO2 footprint along the way and just telling you about the information we have to provide for that analysis. number of substrate layers in various boards, total IC area, number of it'snot just, you know, taking a wild guess, if you will. You have to dig deep down into the hardware details to be able to get thePI analysis. Now,what does that mean for NetApp? Well, we're using this engine. We're taking all of that information I just talked about for hardware specifics. um we're taking our um what we call kilowatt hours per year and using that for the usage phase. Then we're generating an LCA analysis. We have the capability to do it by country. You know, if you look at different countries, uh theamount of uh green energy they use varies. Um France is very good in Europe for instance. Europe is better as a whole than the United States. But we're able to get very granular in reporting usage phase um power uh not just power. Sorry about that. Usage phase CO2 gas is emitted from running our storage system for you know um whatever the duration is. So, a lot of information coming out of those systems informing both us and our customers about what they what could they do better uh toserve their customers and uh how we can create a greener atmosphere. Now, Chris, I want to transition specifically to the C series, right? You know, all of these things aregreat. We're trying to continue to innovate, right? We understand that sustainability is a big force and so how can we how are we getting behind this with the C series andhow is that CER helping customers achieve their sustainability goals even further? >> Well, so the C series which we launched in February um leverages some of our existing hardware so we we'rewell informed about the sustainability aspects of it. What CER brings to the game is the ability to do storage consolidation. And ifyou look at storage systems from you know 2014 2016 before SSD and all flash arrays really exploded the way to get performance out of high-end systems was with hundreds of spinning drives. And you can imagine the amount of rack space that takes you can imagine amount of power that takes you also imagine um you know howhard it is to cool what could be cabinets and cabinets of uh hardware. So what C series does it takes, you know, all of that capabilities of say a m a high-end system from 2014 and all of the hundred suspending drives it would take to get peak performance and condenses it in many cases this small as a 2U form factor and reduces power by a significant amount. So that'sone way the C series alone can help you reduce your greenhouse gas emissions as a customer. We'll get this in front of customers kind well you know starting with our account teams and our partners but just get this information in front of customers so they can make informed decisions.So, I'm hearing footprint consolidation, less power, less cooling, but anotherpiece of that that's maybe not uh as much sustainability focused, but isyou're going to be able to manage less assets, right? Your team doesn't have to focus on managing so many assets, worrying about any of those uh all of those discs spinning, right? Uh so, a bonus on the uh the point or bonus points there, Chris. Um, I want to take a moment to pivot here andtransition to the storage efficiency, right? I think there's some technologies of course on tap is featurerich. There's something within the C series that I want you to fill therest of us in on. >> Oh, you bet. So, you know, thedensity alone is a winning story for customers. Like I did that earlier, you know, example where we talked about racks of equipment in some cases consolidating to a single two-year footprint and in some cases a little bit bigger for you make, you know, but itreally reduces the rack space. Um, how does it do that? You know, this is there's no magic. So the previous generation of performance uh spinning drives were 10k saz and uh that's why it took so many of these drives to get high you know peak performance through dupate from a system with the new QLC drives these start out at 15.3 terabyte per drive and as a result you can imagine if you look at you know 1.8 8 terbte SAS drive or 15.3 terabyte QLC drive. You can imagine you don't need near as many drives to meet the capacity point. So that's oneaspect. The other is with flash media you have the ability to deliver higher performance more IOPS than you do on those 10k spinning drives. And that helps reduce the number of drives you need too. So there's two points there. uh you know much larger capacity means you need less of the 10k SAS drives to reach your minimum capacity and then also you need far few of those 10k SAS drives to deliver peak controller throughput.>> Got it. Okay.So we're consolidating from those SAS drives. We'rereducing the footprint andanother technology behind that I believe is the TSSE. Uh another acronym for everybody to remember. Chris fill us in. Yes. So, TSSE isjust another one of the tools in our storage efficiency tool box. And uh um you know, I know there's a lot of suspense. What the heck is TSSE? It's actually temperature sensitive storage efficiency. TSSE andwhat it does when data is in flight uh into ONAP um to be written to storage media. ONTAP does a few things. one, it dupes data and it looks at existing data on backend storage to figure out if I really need to store this in another location. The other thing it does is it compresses data and it uses an 8K size compression group to squeeze that data down as much as possible. Okay, so now the data gets written to the storage media and fact of the matter is u just under 70% of data on average is never touched again once it hits the storage media. Um but it still takes up space. It still you know consumes power keeping that data in place on the storage media. What TSSE does is it comes back and looks at this cold data. it'll actually apply a second advanced compress compression algorithm 32k compression group size and it'll squeeze that data even further and um as a result you just get better storage efficiency andyou also have more free storage available to write new data too. So TSSE just another tool in the storage efficiency toolbox. Um and you know customers have asked okay what's the default uhperiod before TSSC thinks date is cold. It's actually going to uh by default no changes 14 days and that secondary recompression will happen. But you can turn that knob down to one day in case you're in a lab you want to test or you can turn it as high as 60 days before that secondary compression happens on the C series system.Hope that helped. >> Absolutely.So, what I'm hearing is you'resqueezing every last bit of juice out of that uh out of that compression out of trying to get every efficiency you can. Uh, one thing I want to jump back to, you know, we talked about serving our customers with greener solutions and I think the C series ishitting on that. We also talked about measuring the environmental outputof those systems. Now, when we're measuring it, youmentioned how we're able to get very granular with this, right? One thing we are have just announced is the sustainability dashboard within Blue XP. Can you expand a little bit on what that is andwhat information we can provide to customers through it? Yeah, Jamie, you might have to help me keep from hyperventilating talking about the blue XP sustainability dashboard, [laughter] butI'm so proud of NetApp uh taking a lead in this capability. So, whathappens is customers really don't have great visibility into the environmental aspects of their storage system. Now, ONTAP provides that capability. um it is via CLI, but that's just not a good way to scale and look at your environmental aspects across your entire ecosystem. Well, problem solved. The way Blue XP works is a free service first of all, but also it simply takes all incoming auto support data and itdoes various things. In the case of sustainability, it actually pulls out and extracts all that environmental data and then it reports it to customers. So customers can get a snapshot of a system, a snapshot of a cluster, a snapshot of a data center and their entire ecosystem in net app storage who report things like power consumption. It will report CO we'll actually calculate CO2 emissions.um earlier I should say estimate allthe firms that do CO2 analysis say it's an estimate nota calculation but what we can do in blue XP is we'll actually determine where that system is located and we'll use the green percentage of energy when calculating the CO2 footprint for that given uh systemthere's some other areas to talk about so the way blue XP uh works is the ASEPS come in once a Okay, you can send them in more frequently. You can change that setting, but at least once a day, we'll get power environmental information. Uh, but some customers want to do real time um environmental reporting. And we have a couple of vehicles to do that as well. In this case, customers might be tuning their data center to get the lowest power consumption across cooling onthe hardware, whatnot. So, they want real time. They want to make some changes and see what the resulting power consumption is. In this case, we have a couple of tools that will do just that. Cloud insights is available. Um, it's kind of going a little deeper thanBlue XP. Just gives you more analytics about the system itself. Notthat much more, but it is real time. And then another vehicle is the way ONAP does this reporting is via REST API calls. So you don't have to use blue XP and you don't have to use cloud insights, but where do you get your hands on those REST API calls? Well, if you go to the GitHub uh portal for NetApp uh and pull up Harvest, it has all those REST API calls. You can either use the harvest tool itself or you just copy out all the REST API calls and put them into whatever tool you're using. But it's transparent. It gives customers the power to look at their system any way they need to analyze it in terms of sustainability. Got it. So,don't take our word for it. Uh t take the technologies, right? Um so folks, thanks so much for joining. We really appreciate you coming on today. And if you have any questions about the C series, the sustainability of it, you know who to reach out to, Mr. Chris Luth here. Thanks so much for joining and we'll see you next time. Chris will be joining us again to talk about the scalability of this system. All right, we'll talk soon.