┊・sustainability

[fierce coyote]

Welcome to the channel!

[silk hare]

One of the key takeaways I had from INSIGHT, repeated conversations, was the move away from FAS spinning media to QLC flash media as secondary dense systems simply due to the 70%+ power savings. Sustainability.

[violet moon]

But there was no key announcement what the plan is for e.g. next year?

[lament cedar]

Sounds interesting, I thought the NVMe disks were more power hungry. Where are these numbers showing in the HWU?

Edit: Found it, and crunched the numbers; both spinning disks and QLC come out at 1,5 W/TB for a single disk shelf. What am I missing?

[fierce coyote]

Looking at HDD compared to SSD of various types is a great conversation. I think the sustainability answer is in the realm of it depends on the performance and you need to look at the entire system and not just a single piece of media. For high performance systems typically need a lot fewer media with SSD than HDD. For archive, it is probably better to not replace large HDD systems.

FWIW we do publish all of LCA reports on https://www.netapp.com/company/environmental-certifications/

I think you also need to look at how long the media last, where SSDs are showing a longer lifespan.

[silk hare]

As far as what? When the show will be?

[lament cedar]

The claim by @silk hare was specifically for power savings though, is that number reflected in a report or where does it come from?

[ocean fern]

Of Interest to this channel: I am a member of the FinOps foundation SIG working group coming up with the sustainability framework for the new version of the FinOps standards, so I would love to be able to pick the brains of folks in here to discuss thoughts around what we are working on

[sturdy geyser]

I can be rather cynical, what exactly do you mean by 'sustainability' and what are you looking for in your framework?

[ocean fern]

Basically we are giving clarity to how FinOps intersects, overlaps, and enables the practice of Cloud Sustainability, but right now there is no way to identify and quantify Sustainability to cloud environments.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ewx4-QTWV8XqfkhQbimT6yPjrlQgDtkTlqNLEDqlLq4/edit?pli=1#gid=0

[sturdy geyser]

You should probably include a requirement in the framework for a specific definition of sustainability, thats the most important part for setting your actual goal, because you can have financial sustainability wrt the business, ecological sustainability wrt greenhouse gases, or ewaste sustainability such as making sure discarded equipment doesnt wind up in getting recycled in some village somewhere.

[ocean fern]

Its a really new area to be stepping in, but Sustainability is such a topic right now they felt they had to address it.

And while i appreciate the cynicism because I had it too when I joined, I think that the results will be useful for companies with big sustainability initiatives without "greenwashing"

And that is what we are working on this week, a really nailed down, realistic definition o f sustainability

[sturdy geyser]

Hmmm.

[fierce coyote]

Picking up the HDD and SSD. We do have accurate numbers on NetApp systems. For example, replacing two FAS 8040 with ~260 TB (raw) with a single C250 with 275 TB (raw) provides better performance while reducing the power consumption from 25kWh/yer to 7k kWh/year. It also reduces the rack units required

So, your mileage will vary based on what you are coming from and what you are going to, but there is a clear benefit in terms of power consumptipn

[silk hare]

+1, and I'll add that the key component there is RU density. Moving from 3.5" spinning media to QLC flash media, using those same ~275TB numbers. You'd go from a full 48U rack of controllers and shelves to 2U with just a starter AFF C250.

[fair seal]

C250 seems to be the sweet spot, we will replace a few A700 and FAS9k with 3.5"/SATA next year... And finally get rid of rotating rust

[fierce coyote]

Latest ESG report was released this week. You can find it at https://www.netapp.com/esg/sustainability/

[lament cedar]

Very interesting! Can you break down the numbers a bit for me?
If the disk shelves are the same Watts per TB as per my previous response from official HWU numbers, then I guess all of the power savings are on the controllers?

[fair seal]

There is a Grafana Dashboard for Power consumption

[fierce coyote]

Sorry for late reply. I think a more complete way to think about the topic is how much media and how many shelves do you need to meet the requiremetns of the apps you are serving. We have found that many apps would require more disks because the workloads are essentially spindle bound. In those cases, SSDs make more sense. If the worklaod is more capacity oriented then larger HDDs could do the trick and they would consume less power.

Good to be able to use both.

[fierce coyote]

Just curious, anyone starting to work on CSRD or have a view on what it means to your organization?

[hearty roost]

I have started specifically asking this in EBCs where i participate. Everyone is “busy” tho mostly its handled outside of traditional IT

[obsidian sorrel]

@hearty roost

[hearty roost]

eh? I see you're new here - welcome 🙂