NetApp Portfolio Innovations to Address Energy Costs, Heightened Sustainability Goals for Global Organizations

NetApp, Inc. announced availability of ways for companies to monitor, manage, and optimize their carbon footprints across their hybrid, multi-cloud environments.

The company also outlined its commitment to achieve a 50% intensity reduction of Scope 3 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions (produced by an organization’s value chain) by 2030, and a 42% reduction of Scope 1 (controlled or owned by an organization) and Scope 2 (electricity, heat, and cooling purchases) GHG emissions through adoption of a science-aligned target.

“The unparalleled environmental challenges we face require everyone to be a part of the solution. We are deeply integrating sustainability into the strategy and operational priorities of our business,” said George Kurian, CEO. “It’s our belief that the world’s ongoing energy challenges require innovative solutions and we’re steadfastly committed to continuing to develop energy-efficient technologies and solutions that allow our customers to greatly reduce their carbon footprint. We’re also committed to expanding sustainable practices within our own business by setting a bold, but achievable target of a 50% intensity reduction of Scope 3 Greenhouse Gas emissions by 2030.”

With tools and resources announced at NetApp INSIGHT, organizations can more effectively achieve their carbon reduction goals while meeting their own customer demands:

BlueXP delivers a unified experience across hybrid multi-cloud environments to bring all application and storage services into a single control plane. It provides power-consumption reporting with dashboards that allow companies to make decisions about moving critical data to balance business needs with carbon efficiency.
Cloud Insights dashboard is a feature that reports on power usage and temperature for ONTAP storage. It provides visibility and reporting of an organization’s use of compute and storage across all on-premises and cloud environments to find and address waste and inefficiencies, which helps customers make informed decisions that can reduce costs and waste, including those around reducing emissions.
Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) carbon footprint reports leveraging the Product Attribute Impact Algorithm (PAIA) methodology. The firm was the first storage-focused provider to join PAIA, a consortium of information and communication technology peers, sponsored by MIT. The PAIA consortium allows the company to produce a streamlined LCA for its products that is aligned with standards including EPEAT, IEEE 1680.1 and the French product labeling initiative Grenelle.
NetApp’s 4:1 Storage efficiency guarantee for SAN workloads is the firm’s promise that companies can store more data with less storage, which reduces energy usage and GHG emissions. The guarantee covers all ONTAP all-flash systems including AFF A-Series, AFF C190, All SAN Array, and FAS500f.

The company’s entire portfolio of products and services enable customers to build out the hybrid multi-cloud environments that meet their business and sustainability objectives and provide a holistic, comprehensive approach to creating a more sustainable IT structure.

Cloud tiering allows companies to automatically and seamlessly move infrequently used data, often 60% or more of a company’s total data estate, from on-premises ONTAP storage to the cloud. For data that must remain in the data center, it reduces the amount of raw storage needed through de-dupe, compression and compaction. With Cloud Tiering, over a 5-year period, the firm’s midrange storage customers reduce their emissions by up to 56.3 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e).
Cloud Data Sense is a data catalog and classification solution that uses artificial intelligence to map and classify all cloud and on-premises data. Understanding the data can help IT organizations reduce storage costs and improve sustainability through better decision-making, for example by identifying cold data that resides on-premises and may be moved to the cloud to reduce energy used in the data center.
Active IQ (AIQ) is an AIOps engine that tallies the TCO for frequently used and accessed data stored on-premises, and the company’s Cloud Tiering TCO tool calculates the savings generated by moving to the cloud.
Harvest 2.0 and Grafana Dashboard for ONTAP provide real-time insights into the power consumption of the firm’s hardware while Fusion, a sizing and configuration tool, provides environmental specifications by specific configuration.

“Companies need visibility into, and insight on, the sustainability and efficiency state of their hybrid, multi-cloud environments to better understand where they can make changes to reduce their carbon footprints,” said Cesar Cernuda, president. “NetApp’s ongoing commitment to innovation in our product portfolio, combined with the company’s decarbonization efforts, provide organizations with the tools and resources they need to reduce costs, run more efficient operations, and enable emissions-based decision making in order to achieve their own sustainability goals.”

The company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitment and leadership has been recognized by experts, including EcoVadis who recently awarded NetApp a Gold ranking. This evidence based ESG rating agency provides supplier ratings across the elements of environment, labor and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement. A Gold rank puts the firm’s among the top 7% of all companies rated by EcoVadis.

The company is a founding member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR program for data center storage, with multiple storage systems certified as ENERGY STAR 2.1 products, including AFF, FAS and E-Series data storage systems.

Later this year, NetApp’s 3rd ESG Impact Report will be published. The report covers firm’s ESG strategies, activities, progress, metrics and performance for global operations for the fiscal year ending April 30, 2022.

Resources
NetApp Sustainability Web Page
Sustainability Series on NetAppTV