SoftIron: Assessment Conducted by Earth Capital Reveals Carbon Reduction Impact of HyperDrive Storage Platform

SoftIron Ltd. announced that an assessment conducted by Earth Capital Ltd., has affirmed the company’s status as a leader in energy-efficient data infrastructure solutions for core-to-edge data centres.

As a member of the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, which aims to galvanise the asset management industry to commit to a goal of net zero emissions, Earth Capital produces assessments on all of the companies in which it invests, including SoftIron.

Available, the assessment highlights firm’s leadership in sustainable IT solutions through its design and manufacturing initiatives. The report demonstrates how the company is helping its customers reduce their carbon footprints through the use of its integrated HyperDrive storage platform that reduces space and energy footprint, highlighting that the energy usage of the platform “is up to 5x smaller than that of equivalent appliances on the market.” 

HyperDrive storage appliance

Highlighting the carbon reduction results that HyperDrive storage platform enables its customers to achieve, the assessment states, “how can SoftIron help reduce their customers’ carbon footprint? In comparison to similar data storage and processing appliances available on the market, SoftIron’s product has a greatly reduced carbon footprint mainly on account of comparably low energy usage during operation.”

The report states that for every 10PB of storage shipped by SoftIron, an estimated 6,656 tonnes of CO² is saved by reduced energy consumption alone. This is the equivalent of taking nearly 1,500 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles off the road for a year.

The report also calls attention to the reductions in heat that the firm’s appliances are able to achieve through their reduced energy consumption, noting that “SoftIron appliances produce up to 80% less heat than the standard, thereby radically reducing emissions pertaining to cooling of data centres.” 

While reduced emissions related to the cooling of data centres is one carbon reducing benefit, the extension of the lifespan of the company’s solutions is another critical factor that the report highlights. “Typical datacenter servers have a lifespan of 3-5 years. As SoftIron’s products use less power and therefore generate less heat during operation, they place less stress on the server (and hard drives) than that of an industry standard appliance, reducing the likelihood of system failure.”

The report notes that because SoftIron solutions only contain the components necessary for its specified function, there is less likelihood of a system fault, thus extending the lifespan of the appliance. The report deduces that “it is reasonable to assume that SoftIron’s products have a minimum lifespan of 5 years.” 

The report highlights that the industry is actually moving in the wrong direction where energy consumption is concerned, lauding the firm’s approach to creating optimised solutions that challenge industry norms: “Many of the industry-standard products adopt a generic model, capable of numerous functions while SoftIron appliances are fully integrated and task-specific such that each appliance only contains the components and processing power necessary for its specified function. Many market-leading data centre suppliers acquire commoditised, off-the-shelf hardware which use the latest iteration of CPUs. Research indicates that each iteration of CPU requires more power than its predecessor. Therefore, the industry standard data centre appliances are in fact becoming less energy-efficient, thereby creating more financial and environmental costs for data centres. Meanwhile, SoftIron’s task-specific and fully integrated design means that every aspect (from the hardware to the software) is optimised to make the most energy-efficient product possible. This enables SoftIron to deliver industry-leading performance while using less power-hungry CPUs.” 

In addition to highlighting the performance metrics that SoftIron is achieving, the report also highlighted how the firm is tackling the reduction of carbon footprints through its own efforts, including standardising the product design, reusing/recycling at manufacturing facilities, reducing software configuration time, installation of a Hot Aisle Containment (HAC) system in its manufacturing facilities, reducing plastic packaging, and its clean supply chain pledge.

The report also highlighted the company’s ‘Edge Manufacturing’ approach, which uses the most modern technologies available, including digital twin technology, to bring new efficiencies to IT manufacturing.

“SoftIron is moving towards a model of operation (known as ‘Edge Manufacturing’) which involves locating manufacturing sites closer to the customer, thereby enabling greater use of local supply chains and reducing emissions pertaining to transportation,” the report explained.

“When we founded SoftIron in 2012, we did it recognising that the industry’s path for manufacturing IT solutions was fundamentally broken for the requirements of the future, both in the core data centre and especially at the edge,” said Phil Straw, CEO and co-founder. “In essence, SoftIron has completely reinvented and modernised how data infrastructure is designed, manufactured and delivered in virtually every regard. The results are solutions that are superior in virtually every way possible, from power draw and heat emissions, to density, and to eliminating vendor lock-in through our use of open source – the list goes on. We’ve designed a platform for IT solutions that is centred around the modern needs of our customers, enabling them to flexibly scale their IT solution wherever it is needed without the constraints and limitations of traditional commodity hardware-based solutions.”

Resources:
The Earth Capital SoftIron Carbon Footprint Report 2022  
SoftIron’s sustainability efforts