If you want to create sustainable products, start with data centers.

Building goods that are designed to minimize their environmental effect from the start may go a long way toward delivering on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals as well as commercial impact as the globe strives toward net-zero carbon targets.

According to Deloitte, taking the appropriate climate action may boost the US economy by $3 trillion by 2070 rather than costing it $14.5 trillion if nothing is done. The World Economic Forum, on the other hand, observes that business executives have a strong belief that proactively reducing carbon impact is a source of competitive advantage as well as a duty that can save costs, satisfy customer demands, and draw in talent.

At Pure Storage, we’ve got a personal look at the explosion of data and its influence on data infrastructure resource consumption, since data and data insights are crucial to the creation of goods and services across sectors. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that data centers use 1% of the world’s electricity, although energy efficiency has helped to restrain this development even as demand for data services has surged.

Data centers are unquestionably essential to any company sustainability plan because of the exponential rise in data and the insights it provides. And as data demands rise, it becomes increasingly important to reduce the environmental effect of data infrastructure. Data storage that is designed to use much less power, cooling, and waste, and that has the potential to have a major and immediate impact on lowering global data-center carbon emissions, is necessary to build a sustainable model for the future.

Since our foundation, Pure has made investments in developing goods and services that are both highly efficient and sustainable. We recently hired a third-party environmental assessment company to perform a product life cycle assessment (LCA) of our all-flash storage array products in order to quantify these impacts. The results showed that Pure customers can reduce direct carbon usage by data systems by up to 80% when compared to competitive products.

And we just released our first-ever ESG report, gathering knowledge along the way that we think will enable businesses to reduce their carbon footprint and accelerate digital transformation. The four steps listed below can help businesses evaluate their own environmental impact:

1.To identify priorities, carry out an evaluation of materiality.

A materiality assessment is a systematic effort to involve stakeholders and find out how significant various ESG problems are to them. They can assist identify major priority areas connecting stakeholder involvement and corporate performance. According to the Conference Board, they are also becoming more popular, with the majority of businesses using them either initially or as part of an evaluation of their sustainability plan. Our daily work is driven by a dedication to achieving exceptional results for all stakeholders, but our own assessment will help us concentrate our efforts in the areas where we can have the most influence.

2.Create smaller-footprinting engineering.

Corporate data centers are frequently still designed more for cost, performance, or reliability than for efficiency. While capacity was provided by older magnetic disk technologies, e-waste and wasteful power use were sacrificed. Solid-state media may significantly reduce footprints and let enterprises build and run data centers with less resources. At Pure, we think that the closely integrated hardware and software we use enables us to achieve industry-leading density, lifespan, and efficiency—as well as to gradually enhance and generate even more efficiencies. Our Evergreen design and philosophy relieve our clients from needless and expensive product replacements as well as the accompanying energy and e-waste by continually and non-disruptively updating both the hardware and software components of their systems.

3.Create a service-oriented model to support sustainability.

Genuine “as-a-Service” solutions include purchasing a result (such as a service level agreement) and having it provided by a third party. It should be possible to begin small, expand over time, and maintain pricing and related KPIs—such as sustainability—transparently. In terms of storage, this calls for design that can adapt to changing needs, only deploys equipment when necessary, and allows technology advancements without requiring expensive and disruptive rip-and-replace initiatives. For instance, we can eliminate the energy and waste that are often connected to underutilized or over-provisioned systems by using our Pure-as-a-Service subscription.

4.Supply chain optimization.

Using quality-driven production techniques, selecting a sustainable supplier network, switching to recyclable packaging, and removing packaging waste are all components of end-to-end supply chain optimization. It also calls for ongoing optimization and enhancement, which includes tasks like document consolidation. Rapid expansion and the management of demand spikes can be facilitated by a flexible and responsive supply chain. Working with suppliers all around the world to create a supply chain that can adapt to physical problems while guaranteeing moral treatment of workers and ecologically responsible methods is one of Pure’s best practices.

ESG reporting and the associated work are valuable instruments that may be employed to assess performance and pinpoint prospects for future enhancement. The data center is an excellent place to start when it comes to sustainability.