By Geoff Greenlaw, Vice President, EMEA & LATAM Channel, Pure Storage
The explosive growth of data and corporate digital transformation has kept IT professionals focused more on keeping up with increasing data storage capacity and controlling costs than on reducing their environmental load.
Every one of us has a role in building a more sustainable and environmentally friendly future. As governments and companies set ambitious Net Zero targets, the direction of travel is undeniable. Those of us in the technology industry are increasingly aware of the environmental impact of technology decisions. Building sustainable technology infrastructure is essential to mitigate global warming and the impending impacts of climate change.
The channel has an imperative role in supporting customers to achieve their green goals, cut their carbon footprint and roll out pragmatic, sustainable technology strategies. Let’s take a look at how the channel can position itself at the forefront of efforts to reduce carbon use.
Sustainability is a channel responsibility
It wasn’t too long ago when partners were telling us that sustainability efforts and IT strategies were not discussed in the same conversation. Today, there are very few organisations that don’t have reducing both environmental footprint and energy use, high on their agenda. It’s so important, it’s increasingly being added to Request For Proposals (RFPs).
Add to this the regulatory perspective: governments are introducing new rules and mandatory regulations, and every company is looking to identify ways to cut emissions and improve sustainability. Channel partners need to champion green IT in order to compete effectively and differentiate themselves — ‘being green’ is now truly a competitive advantage.
Those channel partners that aren’t able to recognise the shift in priorities for organisations, and help enable change, are going to be significantly behind the curve. Sustainability is a shared responsibility for everyone — individuals, governments, vendors and the channel all need to play their part in contributing to reducing their own, and their customers’, carbon footprint and ensuring any new technology implemented is as ‘green’ as possible.
Business priorities and environmental impact
Agility and efficiency have been well established as pillars of business success for the channel; pillars which cross-over with sustainability efforts. The explosive growth of data and corporate digital transformation has kept IT professionals focused more on keeping up with increasing data storage capacity and controlling costs than on reducing their environmental load. It’s possible to focus on these concurrently and channel partners can really help here.
As people generate more data, it becomes imperative to implement sustainable technology solutions as a key element to reducing energy use. Channel partners who embrace flash storage will have an advantage. Flash is a perfect example of a technology that supports both business and environmental priorities and helps customers deliver on the need to prioritise sustainability. Innovative flash-based storage arrays use less power than mechanical disk drives while providing better performance on key metrics such as capacity per watt, bandwidth per watt, and capacity per rack-unit, resulting in an overall smaller data center footprint.
With storage systems and components representing a significant portion of the hardware in data centres, upgrading to more efficient solutions can significantly reduce the overall power and cooling footprint. The overall effect is technology that is more environmentally friendly and helps meet customers’ sustainability ambitions.
Sustainable by design
Looking at the tech sector more broadly, entire tech lifecycles, solution design and delivery models have come under scrutiny. This is understandable given the growing number of RFPs that focus on the green credentials of technologies, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and resellers.
A modular approach to design has become the norm in recent years, allowing specific components to be replaced as needed, instead of entire systems: embedding sustainable design into hardware and software. This minimises hardware refresh cycles, reduces e-waste sent to landfill and helps MSPs give their customers the reassurance that their solutions are sustainable.
Scale sustainably
Scalability has become important to customers as they look to make the most of investments without being tied into purchasing technology they don’t use for several years, resulting in waste. Resellers and MSPs need to be able to offer alternative as-a-service models to organisations to only pay for the resources they need, without taking on the management of those resources at the back end.
This approach means technology can be managed centrally by a service provider who is set-up and incentivised to work as efficiently as possible. This leads to lower levels of energy consumption and far less waste, as companies no longer need to run under-used or over-sized systems. Effective, efficient and sustainable.
Channeling our sustainability efforts
When Net Zero requirements first started to spring up, some companies staked out sustainability as a USP: now, it is a business imperative. Setting green commitments as an industry and supporting customers to make this environmental transition must be a priority to future proof the channel for prospective customers. Sustainability will soon be as important a driver for how IT decision makers select IT suppliers as price, performance and cost savings.
Channel partners need to examine the tech portfolio they are offering in order to ensure they have solutions that are as green as possible. Infrastructure solutions should be agile and adaptable, ready to deploy without complete overhauls, ready to expand capacity on-demand as customers need and also reduce energy consumption and emissions. If this is incorporated into channel sales agendas, there is a remarkable opportunity to positively contribute to energy reduction, shape a greener future and set precedents that define our world for decades to come.
