 Hey everyone, welcome to our event, Peer Storage, the path to sustainable IT. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Ajay Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Ajay, it's great to have you back on the program. Great to be back on Lisa, good morning. Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're going to really unpack what Peer is doing. We're going to get your viewpoints on what you're seeing and you're going to leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on their ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from Peer Ajay about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? Absolutely, Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and there's a good reason for it. Data is the new currency, some people call it the new oil and the opportunity to go processes data, gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's going to make a difference between them being on the leaderboard, a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus being kind of somebody that you know, quite missed about. So data is super critical. And obviously as part of that, we see all the big benefits, but it has to be stored. And that means it's going to consume a lot of resources and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated. You know, recent study pointed to roughly by 2025, 175 zettabytes, which each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale of data, that's huge. And they also say that pretty soon, today in fact, in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center, literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding, it has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact- Oh, go ahead, sorry. No, I was saying in fact, some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center energy consumption. Sorry, you were saying? I was just going to say, it's an incredibly important topic and the stats on data that you provided. And also I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long-term implications, the fact that data is growing massively as you shared with the stats that you mentioned. If we think about though, the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And the consumers expect it, we expect that you are going to deliver these relevant personalized experiences, whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements to technology companies have to really start building down their carbon footprints? No, absolutely. If you kind of think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here, we just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news and you know, all the hyperscalers that's crashing the head. I know they've come around that and figure out a way to round it, but it's getting there. Some organizations and areas, jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we just can't do it. And so as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that IT has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. And at Pure, we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency. You know, so to really be energy efficient means you are going to be successful long-term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disk infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of the inefficiency across the silos because the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today, a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. So they're the big opportunity there. So Ajay, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer would love to get your thoughts. What steps is it implementing to help Pure's customers become more sustainable? No, absolutely. So essentially we're all inherently motivated like Pure and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation, you know, that's what we're all about. And while we're doing that, the challenge is how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable, obviously, but more importantly, sustainable. And you can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us. Not only do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today, 80% of the companies, the companies that are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of leadership at companies, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event. It's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you name it, right? So mitigating the carbon impact can, in fact, today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody is skating, wanting to skate towards the puck. And it's good, it's good business too, to be sustainable and meet these customer requirements. In fact, the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting their sustainability initiatives and many are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's really part of the big, the release. So our view is that that IT infrastructure can really make a big push towards greener IT and not just kind of greenwash it, but actually make things more greener and really take the lead in ESG. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead for the organization, the sustainability aspects. I'm curious, Ajay, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus IT coming together? And how does peer health facilitate that? Because to your point, IT needs to be able to deliver this, but it's a board level objective these days. Absolutely, we're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that's unleashed, we definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers starting to do that. So in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company to make IT sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per watt with unmatched storage density. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And how efficient is that? Compared to other all-flash systems, we tend to be one-fifth, we tend to take one-fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning disk. So you can imagine, cutting your data center consumption is say 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage because of all the spinning disk. So you had about 0.8% of global consumption. And if you can cut that by four-fifths, you can already start to make an impact. So we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one-fifth the power, one-tenth the density, but then we take it a step further because, okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-destructive upgrades where using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail. And just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-destructive fashion so customers' data is not impacted, and then we recycle that. So you get a full end-to-end lifecycle from all the way from the time you deploy, much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. That's a great point that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own, customer doesn't have to be involved in that? That's right. And we do that. It's a part of our evergreen service that we offer, a lot of customers sign up for the service. And in fact, they don't even retell them, hey, that part's about to go, we're going to come in, we're going to swap it out, and then we actually recycle that part. The power of AI, I love that. What are some of the things that companies can do if they're early in this journey on sustainability? What are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a daily topic on the news? No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the fourth item that we're going to highlight, the first one is, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment. And a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product, we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards making an impact from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two, companies will also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you're buying, your customers are buying outcomes with SLAs. And when you're starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the Azure service approach. And so for example, for us, we have something called Evergreen One, which is our Azure service offer where essentially, customers are able to only use and have your systems turned on to as much as they're consuming. So that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also, you can optimize your supply chains end-to-end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving recycling, packaging and eliminating waste and that thing. So you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that's following sort of good practices across the globe. And such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you also, the business benefitted, you can also handle surges in demand. For example, for us during the pandemic with this global supply chain shortages, whereas most of our competitors, lead times went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks because we had the sustainable supply chain. And so all of these things, the three things are important, but the fourth thing I say is more cultural. And the cultural thing is, how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos as a company across all the departments? And we're at pure, definitely, it's big for us around sustainability, starting with our product design, but all of the areas as well. If you follow those four items, they'll do the great place to start. That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity. We can have a whole conversation on that. But I'm also glad, Adi, that you brought up culture. That's huge for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business. It has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. That's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging, although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's more on the top minds of folks, but it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as an organization lives and breathes that. My last question for you is advice. So you outlined the four steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? No, absolutely. Obviously, the advice is going to come from a company like Pure, our background kind of being a supplier of products. And so our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the product that you sell to your customers, especially if there's got hardware components in it, the biggest generator of e-waste and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that you can handle at the very back end, you design it upfront in the product. And so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-destructive upgrades had to be designed upfront so that one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system, that non-destructive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware and software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enabled you to recover pieces just when they are about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, in a waste recovery process. So that's kind of the one thing I would say, that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do that type of work. So I mean, it's an important thing. You know, look, this year with the spike in energy prices, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial install point, but from an end-to-end full-life cycle standpoint. Absolutely, and I love that you brought up intention. That is everything that peer is doing is with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy to your point, it all needs to start with intention and of course that cultural adoption. Ajay, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what peer is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable IT. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank you, Lisa, pleasure being on board. Great to have you. For Ajay Singh, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the special event, Peer Storage, The Path to Sustainable IT. The Path to Sustainable IT