🌐 As the demand for data grows, businesses are finding innovative ways to reduce energy consumption, optimize infrastructure, and meet ESG commitments—without compromising on performance. This session offers actionable insights for enterprises navigating these challenges.
On this episode of the The Main Scoop, Jay Subramanian, GM, Core Storage Platforms at Hitachi Vantara, joins Daniel Newman, CEO and Chief Analyst, Futurum and Greg Lotko, SVP & GM, Mainframe Software Division at Broadcom for an insightful discussion on the critical intersection of sustainability and business operations.
🔑 Key themes from the discussion:
- How Artificial Intelligence (AI), observability, and telemetry are pivotal in achieving environmental responsibility within the IT sector.
- Strategies that businesses can employ to maintain eco-friendly practices without compromising on growth or efficiency.
- The role of hybrid IT strategies in promoting sustainability and performance, alongside insights on balancing IT performance and scalability with environmental responsibilities.
- Jay shares future trends he anticipates in sustainable IT, the contribution of sustainable practices to business resilience and growth, and promising IT innovations aimed at minimizing environmental impact.
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Transcript:
Greg Lotko: Hey folks, welcome back to the next episode of The Main Scoop. I’m Greg Lotko, and I’m here with my partner, Dan Newman from Futurum. Good to see you, Dan. How you been?
Daniel Newman: Hey, Greg. It’s good to see you too. A lot going on out there, and it’s always great to catch up here on The Main Scoop. It’s never often enough that I get to see you, but I’m always excited when I do.
Greg Lotko: Yeah, I like when we have the opportunity to do these in person, but I think it’s important that we have the conversations that we know people out there are wondering about, and we make it happen whether or not we can be in person or if we’re out there across the internet making it happen. So today’s topic, exciting, right? We’re going to be talking about environmental responsibility and sustainability. Many businesses are grappling with this, how to align their sustainability goals with the growing demand for data and crunching over that information to do business processes. So we’re going to explore those challenges, talking about energy consumption, optimizing infrastructure, and ESG commitments overall. But when I talk to customers about this, Dan, everybody everywhere, there’s some regulation right going on in the world that’s saying they’ve got to worry about sustainability, they’ve got to worry about the environment. But at its core, everybody says, “Hey, whatever the driving factor is, they’re always trying to be more efficient. They’re always trying to be more effective.” So it dovetails nicely with, they want to do more or whatever they got to do for less.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s a good point, Greg. And look, the last few years have been very focused on this next wave of innovation with AI in our sites. I call it the great enterprise pivot. There was this period of time where ESG was really front and center, and it was an outspoken part of the value or the ethos that a lot of companies talked about. And then AI came, and then suddenly it wasn’t as externally visible, but none of the calculus has changed, Greg. So the fact that we still have to be out there and be concerned with, to your point, how to just drive a more efficient business, but also the concerns that science had put in front of us of how do we address the fact that we have this massive increase in power consumption. We’ve got this exponential scaling of data. As data scales, compute has to scale. Of course, now with some of the new technologies and new time-testing training of models, we did see that maybe you don’t have to scale as much. But the bottom line is, these two things are diametrically opposed. We saw this massive need for energy, GPUs, ASICs, AI training, and then you go, “Well, we also want to be sustainable, but can we say it if all of a sudden our footprint is…” So this is a really interesting time because we still have to do it, but now we’ve created a new and more challenging environment to do it in because we need to embrace AI.
Greg Lotko: And there’s always going to be some new way, some more something else, and we’ve got to do more, more, more, but be good to the environment, be good to the bottom line of our businesses. But let’s pull in our guest for this episode, so joining us today is Jay Subramanian. He’s the GM of Core Storage Platforms at Hitachi. So hey, welcome, Jay, to The Main Scoop. It’s a pleasure to have you on the show. I kind of want to hear a little bit about your role, and then we’ll dive into what your thoughts are on sustainability.
Jay Subramanian: Thank you, Greg, and good to meet both of you, Dan and Greg. It’s obviously great to see you, and I look forward to the conversation. My role, just to give you my background, I’m the General Manager for the Core Platform Storage at Hitachi Vantara, and I’m responsible for all of the BSP block platforms, both the higher end and the mid-range. We have obviously made a significant name for ourselves as a company, especially in the higher end. And a lot of what you’re talking about in sustainability goals is something that we are very, very proud of. I mean, I think one of the things that I will say is Hitachi has won the gold, silver, and bronze from Energy Star ratings for that. So this is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart as well as with the company, and obviously sustainability is becoming extremely important, so we’ll definitely…
Greg Lotko: When I think about this, I mean, we touched on AI a bit. Obviously there’s a lot of data out there, so you’ve got to store it, you’ve got to access it, you’ve got to do it efficiently, but we also talked about all the processing power and the energy that it uses. We’ve had spinning disc, we have flash, there’s tape. You talked about high-end storage. I mean, I’ve got to believe when you are talking to people out in the industry, they’re not just talking to you about efficiency and power consumption and performance of compute, but they’re also talking about it relative to storage. So what are you hearing across the enterprise? Is there a tip of the spear or where they worry about it first, or what’s the advice you’re giving folks?
Jay Subramanian: So from the perspective of what I hear from customers is pretty much every customer, irrespective of the size of the customer, especially in the larger enterprise-sized segment, they are definitely having some level of goals that they have to meet from a sustainability perspective. And I think everybody has a metric that they look at, whether it’s from the context of energy efficiency, power consumption. That’s one thing that definitely comes up. Green IT initiatives are definitely something that people are also looking at. How do I reduce my physical infrastructure moving towards a virtual infrastructure? How do I optimize my resource usage? Those are things that they look at. And the third one I would say is also from a overall lifecycle management. How do we make sure that the entire lifecycle of the IT assets from sourcing to usage are all looked at from the perspective of usage, resourcefulness, as well as also how are we responsible? Are we recycling? Are we disposing the right things? Are we minimizing EVAs? Those are the kinds of things that customers are looking for.
But the other side of the coin to what Greg mentioned is, in terms of challenges, there’s this thing. Data continues to grow. Power hogs are continuing to happen, especially with GPUs coming into play. We are going to see more and more of the compute-intensive workloads. AI obviously is spinning up a lot of the data synthesization, if you will, but people are also worried about, “I don’t want to lose my performance. I have to at the end of the day meet my business SLAs. How do I keep those things in balance?” That’s one thing that people are very, very concerned about.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I think that the storage network and compute all come together to aggregate right now. I mean, we hear about the data center build out, we hear things like Stargate and these half trillion dollar investments that are going to be done. In the end though, we know that the data is the grail. We also know that what we’re hearing in this hyperscale level, Jay, isn’t necessarily the average enterprise. And so average enterprises are trying to couple with how the impact comes from using cloud, how it comes from using prem, how it comes from their mainframe, and they’re putting all these things together. I guess I’d be curious in your mind, the average enterprise is hybrid. The average enterprise is looking across that continuum. How do you see the hybrid approach being an enabler to continue to grow and scale, but at the same time offer a level of sustainability that companies are committing to their shareholders?
Jay Subramanian: At the end of the day, you’re absolutely right, Dan. As customers are moving towards the cloud journey, they have to balance between what kind of workloads have to be put on the cloud, how do we make sure that they can effectively use the on-prem resources, at the same time, keep the capital and operational expenditure at the right balance. At the end of the day, the financial models have to work. Some companies have moved a lot of the things to the cloud, and they’re finding themselves like, okay, this is not working for them because costs are increasing. That’s one thing they’re moving back. Other cases, they’re looking for, “Hey, I can go to the cloud, but at the same time, I don’t have visibility into how this all comes together. What does my hardware lifecycle look like? What are the manufacturing processes being used?” Those are things that are coming into play, especially when they’re looking at green IT initiators.
So they’re trying to find out a lot more in terms of, how do I balance my performance SLOs or the business SLOs or SLAs? How do I make sure that I have the optimum cost models? At the same time, am I meeting all of the sustainability goals? This is pretty much a little bit of a challenge, and every company is in a different place. And having said that, applications, as you rightly said, workloads are sort of being catered to from all of the different places, on-prem, sometimes completely remote locations that are not even connected to large data centers, and of course the cloud itself. So it’s a little bit of, how do I make sure that I can balance all this, and how do I have the visibility of all of these things, is becoming a challenge.
Greg Lotko: And I don’t think people think enough about the data and the storage relative to this overall hybrid approach, the processing, the compute, and where you’re going to keep it, right? I mean, people think about, I’ve heard talk to customers who say, “Hey, I’m going to migrate off of tape. I want to do cheap and deep in the cloud.” Well, cheap and deep in the cloud is actually on tape. So the conversation there should be about, “Okay, I want to be cheap and deep. It doesn’t matter the media, what I’m looking at as the expenditure. Do I want to be one who has to manage the saving of the physicality of it? Do I want to have to manage the tape libraries or the storage or worry about when it gets erased, how it gets destroyed, or all that?” But even to the point of thinking about a hybrid architecture where I’m processing on-prem, off-prem, mainframe, distributed, cloud, I may have processes that are all over the place but need access to some of the same data. Where am I going to keep that centrally? And if I’m not going to keep it centrally, how many copies am I going to proliferate? So the storage, the data, where it resides, how it’s copied, how often it’s copied, really should be an integral part of this discussion as well.
Jay Subramanian: Absolutely. I think the overall construct of data management or data services becomes extremely important in this context. They need to have visibility into where the data resides, how many copies of the data that is required, do I need to keep all these copies? And then from a regulatory perspective, how many copies and where, and who has got access to it? Security is also another aspect of it that comes into play. It is becoming extremely important in this context.
Daniel Newman: So Jay, I feel like we’ve come to this moment now where companies are at this inflection. They’re deciding between going all out for building the biggest compute capabilities. They’re trying to decide, of course, still some of these more traditional hybrid challenges and where do workloads go. They’re scaling data. They’re trying to find obviously that really critical high-value data to build out their hybrid IT capabilities, including AI. And they’re trying to do all this while balancing some of the commitments they’ve made to the market, to shareholders, stakeholders, and sustainability of course is one of these things. Now, we know that the proliferation of AI and the proliferation of what’s next is based in your world on the scale out of data and storage in a really meaningful way. I’d love to get your take from an enterprise IT standpoint. How do you see the sustainability narrative and this enterprise IT moment meeting each other over the next half a decade or even 10 years? Which by the way, is a long crystal ball here, but I have to imagine you’re thinking about this.
Jay Subramanian: Absolutely. This comes up in conversations depending on the levels at which we talk to. At the CIO level, at the senior management level, at the C level, it definitely, definitely comes up. From an organizational or operational perspective, it doesn’t come up as much. And this is where you have to make sure that the people that are actually touching the keyboards and making things running are not as worried about it today. But at the same time, the pressure is definitely coming from the top down in terms of how do I make sure that I can keep the initiatives? I mean, at the end of the day, this is also about the society feeling good about the company, buying something from your company and so forth. And that becomes a very big advantage, especially if you turn it as a differentiator.
So you’re absolutely right. Over the next many, many years or few years, I would say we are going to see more and more people and more and more focus on this. It’s already a problem today. And as we see, as we go further, it’s only going to become more intense in terms of people looking at it, people looking for those check marks. People looking for, are you certified? Or do you have the right level of certification from Energy Star? Are you meeting the criteria on those things? Not just about meeting business goals because at the end of the day, they also want to make sure that there is a future for the world we live in, not just for us, but also for the next generations and so forth. So it is only going to become more interesting.
Greg Lotko: When all these things dovetail is when you get nirvana. So that drops to the bottom line, and you’ve got less expense. You’re producing products. So when all these things are aligned and they work together, that’s when it really works. I mean, there’s been a lot of things in history or technologies that people have driven for that a company just makes an edict, “We’re driving towards this.” And you can’t figure out, well, how’s that going to help the bottom line? How’s it going to help our customers?
Jay Subramanian: Yeah, I think it is both tangible and intangible. I think the tangible thing is exactly what you said. There is some cost savings to be had. At the end of the day, everybody cares about cost. That’s a tangible. The intangible is, am I seen as a eco-friendly company that I can look at it from a future perspective, and does it drive the right behavior? And I think that’s really what we have to look at. I mean, at the end of the day, the three or four things that everybody that I talk to is like, “How do I reduce my footprint? I had 38 racks. Now how can I bring it down to a smaller number of racks?” That’s a physical infrastructure being reduced.
That’s one thing. Second part of it is, how do I make sure that my power consumption is reduced significantly? How do I make sure that, especially depending on the data sets, is the right data being placed in the right place? And for instance, if it’s archival data that I’m not going to look at, can I spin down the drive so that the power consumption is being… I’m just giving you an example in that context. And then similarly, the other part of it is, how do I make sure that the carbon dioxide emissions are reduced? Those are the kinds of metrics that people look at. And I think it is becoming inherently important more and more than ever before. And some areas are already there, like Europe is already there. Americas, if you go to the top Fortune 1000 companies, everybody’s definitely talking about it. Of course, there’s always a strict, what shall I say, conflict between the, how do I get things done, with the push from the top. And I think that’s always going to be there, and I think it’s only going to continue to expand or become more prominent in this case.
Greg Lotko: But Dan, you and I know, and our viewers know from listening to some of our other episodes, we’ve talked about this. Those companies that consciously pick the right mix, whether it be server or compute or platform, and this should be extended to storage and looking at energy consumption, but we know when companies pick the right mix, it has a benefit, and they’re more successful. It drives the results for them.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it does, and it is really important. And of course there’s a lot of this push-pull. That’s why I always end up talking about measurable, sustainable activities. You’ve got to be thinking about delivering the customer outcome. And in that process, you can do good by doing well or do well by doing good, and that’s kind of it. I think what can happen at times is we start to put priorities out of order. So we start to prioritize things that are well-intended, but at times actually set the business back because the first focus has to be getting that right data, in your case, Jay, getting that right data in the right place to make it accessible, exposed to the right applications, stored in viable, using the right amount of power because you’re trying to get them to an outcome. And I think when we’re outcome-centric, we end up getting to some of these good causes in the process. Let’s let Jay play a little bit of a prognosticator here, Greg. Let’s let him do future telling. I asked them to do the 10 years into the future on sustainability. Let’s talk about technologies and innovations… I’m going to make a rule here. You can’t just say AI. You’ve got to pick something. But what kind of innovations in the IT space do you think are most promising right now for helping companies meet these sustainability and environmental impact goals?
Jay Subramanian: Yeah, it’s funny that I’m going to say something that’s not innovative at the same time. This is an old paradigm, but it’s becoming extremely important, this thing. Telemetry and observability, and telemetry and observability becomes extremely critical in this thing because that gives you the visibility into what is happening, what is where. And I think that is the one big part of it that’s going to tell you what it is. Now, once you have that visibility, then you can take action based off of that. If you don’t know a particular set of data, I’m just giving an example, you don’t know what one set of data is just not being touched upon at all, and there’s a disc that is spinning all the time. How do I make sure that I can use that knowledge of this data that has not been touched for the last many weeks? I can spin down the drives as an example. Those are the kinds of, it is a very, very simple example, but when I look at it, density of storage has increased, telemetry and observability is something that is going to continue to improve. And of course, while you asked me not to talk about AI, it’s not about AI, but also making sure you use AI to be able to use this information in a more proactive way. That way you can figure out how to optimize your infrastructure. That’s really what happens.
Greg Lotko: I totally agree. I totally agree with you here. Forget about technology or which particular technologies you’re using to drive it. If you don’t know what you don’t know, you can’t act on it. So it’s one thing to have a lot of data. It’s another thing to be able to observe what’s happening and understand what’s happening and then take action on it. So I mean, for decades, people have been saying it’s all about the data. I mean, we had warehousing and data marts, and we’ve got AI. It’s about understanding what the data is telling you, understanding what’s happening so that you can take action on it. Who cares how much data you collect if you never look at it or you don’t know what to do with it?
Daniel Newman: I thought, Jay, that you were going to tell me that using advanced machine learning techniques, neural network and deep learning, would be a way that you would be able to enable better telemetry through observability solutions. And you would be able to have answered that question without ever actually saying AI, but just every different technique for analytics optimization. Anyways, Jay, I think that’s a lot of fun. I really appreciate you jumping in. Greg and I, we don’t ask the easy questions, but that’s not the point. The point is sort of thinking about the bigger topics. It’s good to hear a company like Hitachi Vantara still thinking about what to do in this particular area because like I said, I think some companies have sort of run away from it at this point. Jay Subramanian, thank you so much for joining us. Let’s have you back again, hopefully sometime soon on The Main Scoop. We appreciate you making some time for us.
Jay Subramanian: Absolutely. I love to. Thank you for having me on this one. Thanks for the opportunity. Great meeting you both today.
Greg Lotko: Thanks a lot, Jay.
Greg Lotko: Bring us home here, Dan.
Daniel Newman: And I want to say thank you to everybody out there for joining us here for this episode of The Main Scoop. It was great to talk a little bit about what’s going on with sustainable IT. But for this episode, for Greg Lotko and myself, we’ve got to say goodbye. See you all later.
Greg Lotko: Good seeing you. Thanks.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
