Driving Sustainability in Business with NetApp’s Nicola Acutt

Hey everyone, it's Alan Humma. Welcome back here to Text Drug tv. Let me introduce you to our next guest.

Her name is Nicola acu. Yes, we got, I think we got it right. Nicola is the Chief Sustainability Officer at NetApp, and let's welcome her here to Tech Drunk tv.

Nicola, it's very nice to meet you. Thank you for coming on. Um, I always like to give the audience a sense of who they're talking to, and we don't get to talk to a lot of chief sustainability officers.

To tell you the truth. I could probably count on two hands how many, unfortunately. So tell us a little bit about you, your background, and how you came to be the, uh, chief Sustainability Officer there at NetApp.

Great. Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Alan, and, um, delightful to share this conversation with you. And I think we're gonna change that.

I think in the future, you're gonna be talking to certainly a lot more chief sustainability officers and, uh, certainly heads of it, sustainability. That is something, um, I think we're gonna see in the future, but we can talk about that later. Um, just briefly, who I am, um, I am newly appointed, well, actually not newly appointed.

I've been in the role for a year. It feels like newly appointed because Yes. Yeah, your Time flies right when you're having fun.

So, I've been at NetApp for a year, and I come into this role as a career sustainability professional. I, uh, grew up in tech. Um, prior to NetApp I spent 14 years at VMware.

Hmm, very cool. Very cool. In a sustainability role, Correct.

In a, uh, social impact, sustainability, innovation, and, um, yeah. Or bringing together the, uh, environmental, the social and the governance responsibilities of a company. So, Nicola, don't be insulted, but I'm sure there are people out here who are asking themselves, well, what exactly does a chief sustainability officer do?

Yeah. How would you answer them? It's a great question.

And a chief sustainability officer's role is first and foremost to understand the broader environment within which a company and businesses operating to interpret that external environment for risks and opportunities related to environmental social governance issues. So our job is to interpret the signals from the markets and from the broader environment and understand what that means, and put together a strategy for the company to mitigate risk and optimize opportunity. So in the case of my role at NetApp, I like to describe it as sort of the three, three pillars of, um, the portfolio.

One is to identify what those risks and opportunities are, and to focus on what the most important ones. So for a company like NetApp in the business of data management, the top issues are energy efficiency and circularity. We can talk about what that means, but in essence, it is the, um, where the physical components of our infrastructure come from, where we procure them from, how we build them, and what the end of life is.

So that's number one of the portfolio set strategy by understanding the external environment. Number two is that protect the business by interpreting reg regulation and, uh, uh, uh, policy and emerging changes in the regulatory environment around us. So I make sure that the company is regulation ready, um, and we're in compliance with, uh, appropriate environmental social governance laws.

And then the third component of my portfolio, which to me is the most exciting and interesting. And really what, what gets me up every day, um, is the innovation aspect. So based on those other two parts of my job, I serve as a business partner to our engineering and our product groups to interpret that information and to help build better products and solutions for our customers.

I love it. Thank you for that. Um, you know, in the same vein, people are saying, okay, so NetApp must be very committed to sustainability 'cause they went and brought you on a year ago as chief sustainability Officer, excuse me.

Where does sort of rubber meet the road in terms of sustainability at NetApp? Look, sustain. While I am new to the company, sustainability is not new to the company.

Um, NetApp is a company that's had a really excellent reputation for doing the right thing for a very long time. Um, so what is new, however, is the changing environment around us. So from a regulation perspective, right?

Um, being ready to address different jurisdictions around the world where we operate, um, is all about actually change management and implementing systems and processes to gather the necessary data to report on sustainability issues. So that was one driver. Another driver is frankly, commercial.

In the places around the world where we operate, sustainability is increasingly a requirement of doing business. And so having a competitive strategy in the market around how our products can better enable sustainability outcomes for our customers was an important factor that that is, um, that is undeniable. And then, you know, the, the third component is about what I call future proofing.

Looking at what's coming and recognizing the need to build strategy around sustainability, around data efficiency, around energy efficiency, around resilience, into our broader sweat suite of offerings and into our vision for the intelligent data infrastructure of the future. Love it. Thank you again.

Alright, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about our topic of discussion today. You know, SoftBank has pledged a hundred billion dollars. This one's giving $10 billion.

That one's giving $600 million. That country is building, you know, a multi-billion dollar AI factory. You know, before you know it, we're talking about real money here as the, the joke goes, right?

But I, I did, you know, all kidding aside, I did a, a segment on Textron gang on this about two or three months ago. There's been north of one like trillion dollars pledged for AI data centers, AI factories as we're calling them. Um, over the last year, how much of it will become real, I guess remains to be seen, but certainly the pledges have been made here.

Now, the fact of the matter is, I don't know if we generate enough electricity in the world today to power all of those AI factories and to do so we'll bring untold damage over our heads, onto our heads from an environmental perspective. So if we are gonna achieve our goals in ai mm-hmm. It seems to me we've got to build sustainability into it.

Sustainability has to kind of go hand in hand if we're gonna scale those heights. Um, wondering what, you know, as a chief sustainability officer, someone who's probably much closer to this than me, what do you think, Alan? I don't think there could be a more pressing conversation than that right now.

Look, the, the promise of AI is transformative, and that is why so much investment is going into it right now. Um, but in order for us to unlock that promise, we have to get smarter about how we're gonna get to the future. Um, and you know, I I like to say that sustainable AI starts with data, right?

Absolutely. We've gotta understand the, the data that's coming in the pipeline, right, that is driving this massive build out. Um, that is number one, right?

And then beyond that, obviously the broader ecosystem of understanding where those electrons are coming from that are going into the systems and the photons that are coming out on the other side, right? Um, so, so let's just, let's just talk for a second about data. And, you know, last year, uh, the, uh, IT sector, um, you know, the, the, the consumption of power, um, and energy is roughly the same of the, as the air, the airline industry, which is about 2%.

Uh, which is kind of mind boggling, right? That AI and that, sorry, that data data companies and data centers con consume 2% of, of the global energy, right? By 2030.

And the, and look, the, the, the numbers keep shifting, right? But we know that they're shifting in one direction, and that's a hockey stick direction that by 2030 it'll be between 10 and 20%. Now, that's extraordinary.

Um, and when you look at the, the, you know, the, the, the challenge on the, the front end, right? The data piece, um, there's an an extraordinary amount of that data that is just not useful, right? But we call this dark data, and that's anything between sometimes 20 to 40%, sometime in, in some research, it's over 60% of that data is created and never used again.

So that doesn't sound like a really smart setup, right? And what's, what's the, what's the older dodge about, uh, innovation, right? The mother of, of, of the necessity, necessity is the mother of, is the mother of invention.

Invention. So we've got on one hand, um, this extraordinary promise and this massive growth of data that's fueling that is behind ai. On the other hand, we've got constraints on energy, right?

There are parts of the world, in fact, I was just in Europe, um, uh, recently meeting with customers and partners, NetApp customers and partners. And, um, I learned that there are cities in Europe that have put a moratorium on any new data centers because of the energy demand, right? And the co the seeming set the setup of conflict between data center needs and community needs.

So you've got the setup, and in my view, and this may be a little bit of con controversial view, but in my view, something's gotta give. And to me, that is where there's an opportunity for innovation number one on how we build our data centers. But, and number two, on data infrastructure itself.

And that happens to be NetApp's sweet saw, Right? So I don't work for NetApp, as you could tell, as you know. And the way I look at it is, is it's really, um, you know, net zero or zero sum is there's only two things we could do here, and maybe we gotta do both.

Number one, we've gotta generate more power, but that power has to be clean, sustainable, renewable, good energy, however you want to define that. Number two, we've gotta be more efficient about the energy we use. And, and as you said, you know, the dark matter, the dark data issue, right?

Is, man, if you could, you know, you're never going to get a hundred percent of that out of the equation, but even if you cut it in half, you cutting maybe up to 30% of your, of your data storage out of the equation. Um, and so we, we need to work on both of these fronts, right? And we're seeing it, look, we're seeing it in a lot of the, the new data center build outs.

We're seeing them build them near hydroelectric sources. We're seeing here in the us Microsoft, I don't know how smart this was, but Microsoft made a deal with the company who operates the old three mile island nuclear facility of the infamous three mile island. You know, they're gonna re re uh, reenergize that and, and Microsoft's gonna build data centers near there.

Uh, whether it's geothermal or, or what have you. People are definite, or, you know, with a new generation of nuclear as well, these mini nuclear plants and stuff, I sort of, one comes into, I, I dunno if it was the thorium or whatever. Anyway, the, the bottom line is, is we're trying to be smarter about building data centers, near energy sources that are renewable, cleaner, cheaper.

I don't know how much help NetApp does brings us there, right? That's not really your sweet spot. But being more efficient in our use of data center, uh, in our use of AI in the data center, in these AI factories as we're calling them, being more efficient there, especially when it comes to storage, is something that's right in the sweet spot, sweet spot for, for NetApp.

So what can we expect to see in that regard from NetApp over the next, I don't know, 18 months? I mean, it's hard to look beyond that. Yep.

Look, you know, Ellen, you, you're absolutely right in that there's, um, and in fact, I, I I like to describe it as sort of two sides of, of the coin. There's one is the how do we make AI sustaina more sustainable? And then there is AI for sustainability.

So that's another conversation that we can have. Um, and as you rightly pointed out, NetApp is not in the BU business of building data centers, but as you, as you, as you outlined, right? There is a huge amount of the, you know, sort of the, I think of it as the, the race to the future around how do we, how do we build data centers that are smarter and that are AI first, right?

They're, they're built for the, for the, um, the, the capacity and the load that, um, that we need. So NetApp is sort of, kind of part of that middle layer. And, um, and we think about, you know, data first and foremost.

So that's why I always say sustainable. It starts with data and understanding that data estate, um, is gonna be critical now and in the next 18 months. And today, you know, our, our approach to sustainable, I, uh, data infrastructure has four key elements, or four building blocks, if you like to it, Alan.

One is kind of Sesame Street, simple store only the data that you need. And NAB has the capabilities to help our customers and partners, um, with things like deduplication, compression, compaction, you know, things that we should are familiar to your audience, right? Um, let's not underestimate the power of classification and tiering knowing what, what your data is, is critical to doing, taking the second step, right?

And that is understanding the energy associated with that consumption. And so today, NetApp has tools that our customers can turn on to get visibility observability into what's going on in the data estate. So, um, we have a dashboard that's built on, um, blue XP that provides real time insight into the energy load and therefore the carbon impact of their infrastructure.

And what's beautiful about that is it's not just like a dashboard telling you how fast you're going, it's gives you feedback on actions that you can take to reduce that impact. So of the customers that have turned on this feature, over 70% of them have taken actions to reduce their, uh, energy, their, their energy footprint, and therefore they're carbon footprint. So, um, I think those two things are, are, are simple things you can do today to manage that massive pipeline that's coming in, that pipeline of data.

Um, then the, that's, so that's building block one, building block two. The second, uh, the third building block is to maximize that on-prem efficiency. So using the best hardware that is designed like NetApps is with a storage efficiency guarantee built in, um, that helps you be massively more efficient given the hardware choices that you make.

And then the fourth building block here is to migrate where it makes sense in your infrastructure to migrate loads to different data centers with a different carbon profile based on your needs, whether that's, you know, cold storage or, or other, other solutions. So in a nutshell, that's today what NetApp can do. Um, and so you're gonna see us spending more time, um, and, uh, really helping our customers understand that so that they can get a handle on sustainability today while building their infrastructure for the future.

Excellent. Nico, I have one more question because we're about outta time. Where can we stay, um, abreast of what you and the NetApp folks are doing around sustainability?

Well, uh, our website for sure. Um, and you know, I, I share on LinkedIn quite often, um, what we're up to, that's probably the most, um, let's say up to date, um, where I share, you know, some of the stories around, um, the work that we're doing. And then of course, we have an annual impact report, which will be coming out at the end of the year that really summarizes, pulls it all together, how NetApp thinks about both the, the data aspect of sustainability and then the operational aspect, which is the, um, the, the, the product itself and the components that go into making our, uh, world class storage systems.

Love it. Nicola, we're about out of time. I'm sorry, I gotta Well, but let, let's continue this conversation.

You know, sustainability is something we've covered here consistently at Tech Trunk. So something that's important to us as it should be to everyone, keep up the great work, keep doing what you're doing, do come back and keep us informed. Okay?

I look forward to it. Alan. This is not going away.

This is a topic that is relevant to I agree almost everyone I talk to. So, um, It's relevant to us and our children. Until next time, Absolutely.

Thank you Nicola acu, chief Sustainability Officer Nedapp here on Tech Drunk tv. We're gonna take a break. We'll be back in a moment.